(JHE) — The Vilnius Municipality has signed a memorandum of understanding with the Vilnius Jewish community and the Goodwill Foundation that will lead to development of the site of the city’s destroyed Great Synagogue as a space of commemoration, education, and Jewish communal life.
No specific details were released, but a statement by the city said that by the middle of 2026, a memorial square will be developed on the site of the synagogue and its complex, where a new Jewish community center will also be built.
“This will return active present and future Jewish life to the place where it was once centered,” Rabbi Andrew Baker, the American Jewish Committee’s Director of International Affairs, told JHE. Baker is co-chair of the Goodwill Foundation, which distributes compensation funds provided by the Lithuanian Government for religious, cultural, educational, and other projects that benefit Lithuanian Jews in Lithuania.
“Many Vilnius residents know why Vilnius is called the Jerusalem of the North,” Vilnius Mayor Remigijus Šimašius said in the statement announcing the memorandum. “The history of Jewish spirituality and science is remembered today by the faded Hebrew inscriptions on the buildings of the former Vilnius ghetto, memorial plaques and monuments. We agreed on how to create a new attraction center for Lithuanians and foreigners on the site of the Great Synagogue, which was destroyed by the Soviets.”
The Great Synagogue was built in the early 1600s in Renaissance-Baroque style. It became the center of Jewish life in Vilnius (Vilna), towering over the Shulhoyf, a teeming complex of alleyways and other Jewish community buildings and institutions including 12 synagogues, ritual baths, the community council, kosher meat stalls, the Strashun library, and other structures and institutions.
It was ransacked and torched by the Nazis in World War II, and in the postwar Soviet regime tore down the ruins and built a nursery school on the site.
There have been ongoing discussions for years on what to do with the site and how to commemorate the building.
Archaeological excavations over the past decade made remarkable discoveries — important parts of the bimah, the foundations of 2 columns, the location of two mikvaot, the outer rear wall, and part of the Synagogue floor. Also found were engraved inscriptions and various artefacts.