AFP runs a story about how “Lithuania’s wooden synagogues, the vestiges of a Jewish presence which was wiped out in the Holocaust, are falling into ruin from a lack of funding and support.”
Marielle Vitureau writes about the dozen or so known wooden synagogues still standing in Lithuania and specifically how there are efforts now to restore the one in Alanta, which “served as a fertiliser warehouse during the days of state farms [and] is now used for storage by Algis Jakutonis, a farmer living next door.”
“I store my stuff there, and we still find traces of the Soviet era,” said the 60-something Jakutonis, while displaying the large iron key to the former synagogue, which he acquired before Lithuania’s independence in 1990. […]
Now, a national Jewish charity and the Jewish Community of Lithuania, the owner of the Alanta synagogue, are looking to restore it.
“The restored synagogues could play an educational role, they are monuments to the memory of our community, once very important,” Daumantas-Levas Todesas, head of the charity and member of the community’s heritage commission, told AFP.
The wooden synagogues in Lithuania are all small, rather simple buildings that look like barns or houses. Their size and simplicity save them — all of the large and elaborate, centuries-old wooden synagogues in Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine and Belarus were destroyed during or before WW2.
Several are in very bad condition and some have been demolished or damaged in recent years (the wooden synagogue in Pakruojas, for example, was damaged by fire in 2009.
A photographic exhibition called “A Kaddish for the Wooden Synagogues of Lithuania” was held last year at the City Hall in Vilnius, sponsored by the Jakovas Bunka Charity and Sponsorship Fund. You can seen a few pictures from the exhibition HERE
See photos of wooden synagogues in Lithuania documented by the Center for Jewish Art