Lithuania Update: 4-year, €1 million+ Restoration of Alytus Synagogue nears completion

UPDATE — Work on the synagogue was completed as of the end of January 2021. The mayor and other officials visited and the town posted a photo gallery showing details of the restored building, including wall paintings, on its FAcebook page — click here to see the gallery.

(JHE) — The four-year, more than €1 million restoration of the synagogue in Alytus, Lithuania, is nearing completion. The restored building will become a division of the Alytus Ethnographic Museum, hosting exhibitions, conferences, seminars, educational programs, training, lectures, book presentations, film screenings, and other activities. There will also be a permanent exhibition on local Jewish history.

A news release from the state’s Cultural Infrastructure Center (KIC) said costs for the restoration totalled more than €1 million. The Lithuanian Ministry of Culture allocated €206,056 from European Union funds; €238,504.16 were added by the Alytus City Municipality, and  €584,200 euros were allocated from the funds of the Heritage Management Program.

Work on the project started in 2016 and entailed structural restoration as well as restoration of interior features, including wall paintings.

Mainly constructed of yellow brick with red brick trim and other decoration, the synagogue was built in 1911 after fire ravaged the town and destroyed an earlier wooden synagogue. During the Soviet era, it was used as a warehouse for salt, then even as a chicken hatchery, but it had long stood empty. Some of the interior decoration has survived, including polychrome paintings in the main sanctuary.

Viktoras Vilkišius, Acting Deputy Director of KIC, described the poor state of the building before the  renovation. On the exterior:

the mortar of the joints was crumbled in most of them, many of the masonry architectural elements were crumpled. In some places, several bricks were missing, and in some cases larger fragments of masonry were broken. It was seen that the masonry of the lower part was damaged by moisture or salts, which would be removed from the walls of the building for several years. The facades on the south side of the building were particularly affected. We also found the interior very neglected: the floors, windows, doors were dismantled.

Remigijus Indriulionis, the director of the company that carried out the work, UAB Ekodora, said the restoration had been complicated and full of challenges, with the biggest challenge the restoration of the interior painting.

A detailed description of the synagogue on the Center for Jewish Art web site — taken from the book Lithuanian Synagogues: A Catalogue, edited by Aliza Cohen-Mushlin, Sergey Kravtsov, Vladimir Levin, Giedrė Mickūnaitė and Jurgita Šiaučiūnaitė-Verbickienė — details the traces of interior decoration that remain.

Remains of wall paintings are preserved on the northern part of the eastern wall. The discernable remains allow a reconstruction of the prayer hall’s decoration. The walls were colored blue. Brown pilasters were painted in the piers, with a gray frieze between their capitals, adorned with scrolls. A blue field with a rose and foliate decoration in the frieze between the capitals. The pointed heads of the windows were surmounted by a rocaille painted in grisaille.

Read the report on the KIC web site

See our article from February about the renovation

See our article from 2017 about the early stages of the renovation

See detailed Center for Jewish Art description and photos