A stairway to a church in Vilnius made of Jewish gravestones has been dismantled and the matzevot returned to the city’s vast Užupis Jewish cemetery where they may have once stood.
The web site of the Lithuanian Jewish Community reports that the removal of the gravestones used during Soviet times to construct the stairway to the entrance of the Evangelical Reform Church in central Vilnius had been completed on January 18.
Under Soviet rule the neoclassical building, which has a columned facade, was turned into a cinema; the front stairway consisting of seven steps apparently was installed when the conversion was carried out. (It served as the Kronika cinema from 1957 untill 1990, when it was returned to Church ownership.) The fact that the steps were made of matzevot was raised by the Jewish community over the past decade and brought to wider international public attention in 2013.
The removal of the church steps is the latest in a series of moves to rescue Jewish gravestones that were uprooted under the Soviet regime and used in construction. The Užupis Jewish cemetery, which had tens of thousands of burials, was razed in the 1960s and essentially used as a quarry for building material, as were the gravestones of the Old Jewish Cemetery, razed in the late 1940s. Thousands of gravestones and fragments have been recovered and returned to the Užupis cemetery site in recent years.
The recovery process began in the early-mid 1990s, when gravestones that had been used to construct the grand stairway that led to the Trade Union headquarters were removed. Some of them — retaining the shape of how they were cut to be stairs — were used to construct a memorial at the Užupis cemetery.
16 comments on “Lithuania: Stairs of Vilnius church made from Jewish gravestones finally dismantled”
It was not enough for the communists that the nazis had ‘removed’ the Jews, they had to remove their memory as well. At least some semblance of justice has been done by returning these gravestones to their rightful place.
I back your wise and correct opinion Francina Pereira. Nao es una brincadera es umza triste verdade. Nessim (Nino) Scialom en Lima, Peru. I would appreciate we stay in contact
my e-mail is
Things like these also happened in countries on “our” side of the iron curtain. And people don’t seem to bother too much:
https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwilqbWIlofgAhUoM-wKHeyaCWwQzPwBegQIARAD&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.pri.org%2Fstories%2F2017-06-19%2Frescued-jewish-tombstones-thessaloniki&psig=AOvVaw2AmUuF4b6LUOl9n-O92jVC&ust=1548445213316996
That´s the problem!!! the Big one – indifference toward Holocaust!!!
As Human Beings, WE MUST REMEMBER!
Otherwise, we don´t are humain beings, but animals!!!!
100%
The original communist party had many Jews in its founding fathers. What turned it so antisemitic.
Here is a resource guide to learning about this, put together by Boston University http://blogs.bu.edu/guidedhistory/moderneurope/marko-l/
The Jewish Bolsheviks had to prove their loyalty by being as antisemitic as the other Bolsheviks. To them Jews were just another Russian ethnic group saddled with an oppressive religion. Stalin was a former Greek Orthodox seminarian, and some Jewish communists had been educated in yeshivahs. The religion of Communism replaced all other faiths. As the chief rabbi of St. Petersburg said when informed that Trotsky’s real name was Bronshtein “The Trotskys make the revolution, the Bronshteins pay the price…”
This was such an unforgivable deed on the part of Soviet Union Communists…..such overt anti-Semitism, such extreme greed and disrespect. Personally, I could never trust or feel warmth toward these nations for hundreds of years.
Saw those stairs in front of the church on our visit to Vilnius 2 yrs ago. Glad the gravestones have been moved to the cenetery.
Will a list be created of the names on the headstones? I am pretty sure my grandparents are buried there. Would love to be able to at least see their headstones even if I can’t find their graves.
What about all the headstones used in the Moscow subway?
I am sorry that the gravestones were removed butcam glad they have been returned-
better
This is great news! Congratulations to all who pushed for this and thank you to the church for accommodating this important heritage rescue!
… רגע יחרד עוד
ודממה.״
אלול בשדרה
Avraham Ben Yitzhak