A new online book offers a detailed documentation of the historic (and only surviving) Jewish cemetery in Alytus, Lithuania, with a brief history of the Jewish community, a map of the cemetery, and photographs and translations of the 99 stones with legible or partially legible epitaphs.
The book results from cooperative efforts between the Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas gymnasium (highschool) and its pupils, the Alytus City Municipality, MACEVA Lithuanian Jewish Cemetery project, and the Alytus Ethnographic Museum.
The Judaica Research Center in Vilnius created a directory of the cemetery in the spring of 2019.
There remain around 200 gravestones and their fragments. The oldest dates from 1790, the most recent from 1937.
Volunteers cleaned up the cemetery — and cleaned the gravestones, and the epitaphs were photographed and transcribed.
Larisa Lempertine, head of the Judaica Research Center at Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania translated the epitaphs into Lithuania and English.
You read the book online — it is produced as a book, laid out in pages — but it cannot be downloaded.
In other news about Alytus, we reported in February on the progress in the restoration of the town’s former synagogue, a more than €400,000 project supported by the European Regional Development Fund and Alytus City Municipality.
The building wil be transformed into a Visual Arts Center, a division of the Alytus Ethnographic Museum (one of the sponsors of the Jewish cemetery book), that will host exhibitions, conferences, seminars, educational programs, training, lectures, book presentations, film screenings, and other activities. An exhibition on Jewish history is also planned.
Click here to access and read the Alytus Jewish cemetery book
1 comment on “Lithuania: New online book documents Jewish cemetery in Alytus. All epitaphs photographed & translated”
the stones are so moving,and so traditional with the phrases in use today with reference to Gan Eden.Congratulations to all the many volunteers who worked on this amazing project