The Cultural Heritage Department of the Lithuanian Ministry of Culture has issued a progress report on efforts to stabilize, and eventually restore, the synagogue at Gėlių st. 6 in Vilnius. The work is being carried out via principal funding from the Cultural Heritage Department, with additional funding from the Lithuanian Jewish Community.
The Jewish community posts an English translation of the statement:
Until the work was started, the house of prayer was in a dangerous condition. The roof has holes and so the building is being affected strongly by the environment. Because of this some of the flooring and the internal cupola collapsed, the wooden roof construction was rotting and the mortar in the walls was decaying.
In order to avoid an accident and solve the dangerous situation, supports were put in place to hold up the wooden flooring and wooden rafters supporting the roof to keep it from caving into the building. Also, a wall of silicate brick and metal constructions which were obscuring the facade of the synagogue as well eroding the mortar in the original brick walls and thus endangering the entire building are being removed.
The Cultural Heritage Department has allocated over 50,000 litas [approximately 14,431 euros] from its Heritage Conservation Program for 2014 to carry out these tasks. The Vilnius Jewish Religious Community has allocated a further 5,000 litas. Architect Irena Staniūnienė drafted the plan to save the building.
Department director Diana Varnaitė said the work at the synagogue is mandatory. “Today the […] Synagogue is one of only a few surviving in the capital city, while in the past in Vilnius, where there were many Jews, there were about one hundred. We must preserve the still-standing Jewish houses of prayer for future generations. This is not just out of respect to the Jewish community, but also to preserve the face of Vilnius, after all, we present the capital as the Jerusalem of Lithuania. But today, someone who didn’t know it was there might pass by it without even noticing, the synagogue is hardly recognizable. In order to return the building to its original appearance, much work awaits us in the future, but until that happens, we are doing what we can, stopping complete collapse and at the same preparing a plan of restoration work so that we can begin as soon as possible.”
The Synagogue was built in the between 1817 and 1833 on the site of a wooden building which once belonged to the merchant Zavel Peisakhovich. The synagogue was restored many times and greatly expanded in the second half of the 19th century. It operated until 1940. After World War II it housed storage facilities and apartments, and from 1990 on was abandoned.
Read statement in Lithuanian, on the Culture Department web site