Archaeologists are moving forward this summer with a longterm project using sonar and ground-penetrating radar (GPR) to discover and document a one-time Jewish shtetl in Lithuania that today lies at the bottom of a man-made lake.
The team is led by Dr. Richard Freund, longtime Director of the Maurice Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies and Greenberg Professor of Jewish History at the University of Hartford, Connecticut, and author of the new book The Archaeology of the Holocaust. (He is to take up a new post in August– Bertram and Gladys Aaron Endowed Professorship in Jewish Studies at the Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia.)
Freund has been involved in or led a number of other Holocaust-related archaeology projects, including the ongoing work at the site of the destroyed Great Synagogue in Vilnius and the discovery of an escape tunnel at the Ponary death camp outside of Vilnius.
The shtetl in question is Rumšiškės — Jewish Rumsheshok — between Kaunas and Vilnius, located today under Lake Kaunas reservoir within the territory of the Rumšiškės National Open Air Museum, one of the biggest ethnographic museums in Europe. The lake was created in Soviet times, when the authorities dammed the Nemunas River in 1959 and flooded the old part of town, including the Jewish quarter.
“Mostly our work involves noninvasive geoscience to decide whether a full archaeological treatment is justified,” Freund wrote in a blog post about the project.
This past January, Freund brought students to work after the lake had frozen over so that they could set up and use Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) from positions on the ice.
A blog post from that session described what they were mainly looking for — traces of buildings including the rabbi’s house and synagogue, and also the remains of the Jewish cemetery.
we are looking for what is left of the Jewish village and any other part of the rest of Rumsiskes that might appear nearby. The Jewish cemetery is also a good target because the memorial stones are supposed to still be there at the bottom of the lake in their original places. This should be a rather large series of anomalies all gathered in order under the lake 15 feet below the surface. […] Prior to the flooding of the old town, every grave from the Jewish cemetery in Rumshishok was dug up and the remains moved to the Rumshishok section of Kovno [Kaunas] Jewish cemetery. The Soviets, however, prevented the relocation of the headstones so the mass burial was facilitated. This means that there are literally scores of memorial stones that would be easily located under the water.
The surveys carried out identified the shtetl’s general location under the water.
The summer session is taking place this month — July 2019. It has three main projects for the session: using GPR to identify the site of the Holocaust mass grave site at Rumsiskes; a sonar and diving project; and contributing material to the Open Air Museum so that it can better represent Lithuania’s Jewish heritage and history.
In a blog post July 8, Freund described the use of sonar:
The theory of the sonar is quite simple. Bouncing acoustic waves from a torpedo like device under the water to establish photography like features for the bottom of the lagoon was our goal and it worked! […] The sonar showed that there were indeed the foundations of the building, structures, Wells, streets and parts of homes still on the bottom of the lake.
Divers have gone down to take a closer look — including a “master diver from Massachusetts” named Ross Hill, who, Freund wrote, is the great-great grandson of Jews from the submerged village.
We look forward to learning the results of their dives!
Read Dr. Freund’s full July 8 blog post, with pictures
Read the January 2019 blog post