This week I was lucky to travel with my husband and father to Lithuania, in search of a better understanding of our family heritage. My family’s history in the land of the Litvaks goes back a long way — even to the end of the 19th century, when our forefather Jacob Wilks left his home of Telz, Lithuania and moved to the new world. Through the excellent information and insight provided by local Jewish guides, we learned that he probably did this to escape deadly Russian military conscription, both for himself and his eventual children. Though he did not know it, it also spared him and his family from near certain death in the Holocaust in Lithuania, which claimed the lives of over 90% of the country’s Jewish population. Had Jacob not left, I would not exist. Here are some photos of our journey in both Telz and Vilnius/Vilna, the capital:
Us at the entrance to TelzAn old shul in Telz, possibly the one our family prayed inA wall marker — many former Jewish buildings in Telz have one of theseThe former pre-1941 NKVD (KGB) building in Town. Early in the Nazi occupation, Telz’s Jews were brutally punished by locals for Soviet atrocities in which they had no part. This was one sites of the Soviet atrocities which claimed about 70-80 lives. Upon arrival, the Nazis used this event to inflame local Lithuanian anti semitism. Almost 3000 local Jews were murdered in Telz, many by their Lithuanian neighbors.This sign on the wall of the former Telz girls school commemorates the over 500 students of this place who were murdered in 1941.Ghost buildings — former Jewish businesses, like this one, are everywhere in Telz. Those who occupied these stolen buildings often closed up their commercial entrances, as shown here. Telshe Yeshiva – once famous around the Jewish world. While the building has been beautifully restored, there is no one to study here anymore, which made me quite sad.A memorial on the Yeshiva’s outside wall.Matt walks in Telz’s semi-abandoned Jewish cemetery. Thousands are buried here, though not the murdered. After WWII, many locals stole gravestones for use in construction.A place of horror. This site, still barely memorialized, is where the men of Telz were murdered. About 2,000 people lie in this place, under these trees. Several hundred mass graves exist around Lithuania. Only in recent years have they begun to be marked and remembered.Vilna ghetto street artYidishe Gas in the Jewish quarter of VilnaVilna Gaon Statue on the site of his former house. Neither it nor the adjacent former grand synagogue survived the war and later soviet occupation.A stumbling stone in Vilnius to remember a holocaust victim. Icchokas Rudasevskis was abducted from this place — a school — at the age of 15 and killed in the Ponar forest. About 70,000 others from Vilna shared his fate.The only remaining synagogue in Vilna. There is rarely a minyan. We were also told there is a Chabad house.Hertzl mural — a gift to the city of Vilnius from the State of Israel.Russian/Hebrew language siddur
