Vilna

The Jewish community in Vilna reached its peak at the beginning of the 20^th century. Nearly 100,000 Jews lived in Vilna at that time, constituting almost half of the city's population. Vilna was the capital city of Lithuania, but was commonly called the "Jerusalem of Lithuania" because of the prominent role played by Jews in the city. There were 105 synagogues in the "Jerusalem of Lithuania."
 All of the political, ideological, and religious movements of modern European Jewry were active in Vilna, and a large proportion of them were founded in the city's large and vibrant Jewish community.  

Early History

The Vilna Jewish community is first mentioned in the city's tax records for 1568, but historians believe that there was a Jewish community in the city several decades before that. In 1633, the Jews of Vilna were granted a charter of rights allowing them to work in all spheres of commerce and live in all of the city's streets. Although Vilna was geographically remote from Central Europe, Jews came to the city from Western and Central Europe, especially from Frankfurt and Prague. 3,000 of Vilna's 15,000 residents in the mid-17^th century were Jews.

War broke out between Russia and Lithuania in 1794. The Russian army conquered Lithuania, and an anti-Russian rebellion broke out there. The rebels' center of activity was in Vilna, and young Jews joined the rebels as a sign of identification with their demand for an independent Lithuania. The rebellion failed, and Lithuania remained under Russian rule. The status of Lithuanian Jews in general greatly declined under the Czarist regime, and the Jews in Vilna were especially affected. The authorities hounded Jews in Vilna because young Jews had participated in the 1794 rebellion.

The perception of Jews by the Russian regime changed in 1812, when soldiers of the French army under the command of Napoleon conquered Lithuania and began advancing towards Russia. Thousands of Jews enlisted in the Russian army, and many of them lost their lives in the fighting. The Russian authorities gave the Jews credit for doing this, and in 1814, at the end of the war, they canceled many of the economic restrictions on the Jews.

During the 18^th and 19^th centuries, the Vilna Jewish community established itself as a religious center for all European Jews. Some of the greatest rabbis lived in Vilna, and the Halachic (Jewish religious law) disputes between the leading rabbis in the city affected the thinking of religious leaders in larger and more distant Jewish communities. Among the leading rabbis who lived in Vilna in the 18^th and 19^th centuries were Rabbi Elijah Ben Salomon Zalman (the Vilna Gaon), Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kaidanover, and Rabbi Baruch Harif.

Under the influence of the Vilna Gaon's school of thought, the Jewish community in the city became a lively center of disputes between the Hassidic movement and the Mitnagdim, led by the Vilna Gaon. For the last two decades of the 18^th century and the beginning of the 19^th century, the conflict between Hasidim and Mitnagdim sometimes skirted the edge of violence, false accusations made to the authorities in order to bring about the arrest of people on the other side, calls for boycotting the other side, and a severing of economic and family ties.

The two sides eventually reached agreement in the early 19^th century on an end to hostilities, but throughout the 19^th century, there were cases of harsh disputes between the two movements.

Vilna as the Center of Political Activity in the Jewish World

For over 150 years, Vilna was an important center in the Jewish religious world. Another, no less important, Jewish movement began in the mid-19^th century, resulting in upheaval and disputes in the Jewish world. One of the most important cornerstones of the Jewish Haskalah movement was laid in Vilna in 1842 with the founding of secular schools for the Jewish community funded by the Russian government. The new Russian government saw the Jews as a society with great potential in education, and devoted a great deal of effort to "turn them into Russians," i.e. to expose them to Western Christian education.

A rabbinical seminary was founded in Vilna in 1847 with funding from the Russian government. Other secular schools were subsequently founded by the Russian government – a trend that spread from Vilna to other cities in Lithuania and Poland.

Simultaneously with the Haskalah movement, Jewish political activity began to flourish. Socialist Jews in the city's rabbinical seminary began operating in Vilna in 1861, and tried to show a connection between the socialist ideas and Jewish thought. Religious Jewish associations, which were active in almost every Jewish community in Central and Eastern Europe in the 20^th century, began operating in Vilna in the final decades of the 19^th century.

The activity of the Jewish socialists bogged down in the 1870s. Towards the end of the 1880s, however, it regained its force, and Vilna in effect became a center of Jewish socialist activity. There were over 70,000 Jews in Vilna at this time, constituting approximately 40% of the city's population.

A conference of Jewish socialist intellectuals was held in Vilna in 1895. The Bund party, the largest Jewish socialist movement in Europe, was founded in 1897 at a conference of Jewish workers in Vilna. Together with Warsaw, the Polish capital, Vilna was the main focus on the Bund's activity, and the party's main offices were located in the city.

In addition to the socialists and the Orthodox Jews, the Zionist movements also operated in Vilna on a large scale. One of the first and largest branches of Hibbat Zion was established in Vilna at the end of the 19^th century. Theodore Herzl visited the city in 1903, and was welcomed by thousands of Jews in a demonstration of support. The main offices of the Russian Zionist Organization were located in Vilna for nearly a decade, as were the main offices of the Poalei Zion movement.

During WWI, Lithuania was conquered by the German army, but won independence after the war, resulting in the beginning of Polish occupation of the country. In effect, Lithuania was at war from 1914 until 1920, and suffered severe economic damage as a result, from which the Jews also suffered, including the Jewish community in Vilna. Many young Jews in Vilna participated in the fighting against the Polish army. In 1919, in revenge for the involvement of Jews in the fighting, the Poles murdered nearly 100 innocent Jews on a main street in the city.

The war ended in 1922, followed by a period of prosperity for the Jewish community in Vilna. During this period, Vilna was indisputably the "Jerusalem of Lithuania." Many schools were founded at this time for studies in Hebrew, and an internal conflict ensued between supporters of Yiddish and supporters of Hebrew. The Zionist movements wanted to expand education in Hebrew, while the Bund supporters believed that education in the Yiddish language and culture should be strengthened. The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research was founded in Vilna in 1924.  

From the Beginning of the 20^th Century until WWII

The situation changed completely with the outbreak of WWII in September 1939. The Red Army invaded Lithuania at the beginning of the war, and the USSR annexed the country. Vilna suffered heavy damage from military action, but the real problem facing the Jews in the city was the mass stream of Jewish refugees from Poland fleeing the German army. Russian rule in Vilna lasted for two years. On June 24, 1941, two days after Operation Barbarossa began, German soldiers occupied Vilna. Thousands of Lithuanians who supported the Nazi party welcomed the German army with flowers. The Germans began imposing restrictions on the Jewish population in the city on the very same day.

The leaders of the Zionist organizations and the Bund had no intention of surrendering to the Germans without a struggle. In January 1942, they began gather weapons, and founded a joint underground organization. With the help of their intelligence apparatus, the Germans discovered the organization and managed to arrest one of its commanders, Yitzhak Wittenberg. The first significant act of resistance by the Jewish underground organization in the Vilna Ghetto was the operation to free Wittenberg. Members of the underground killed the soldiers leading Wittenberg to the Gestapo's offices and released him.

That night, the German commanders notified the leaders of the Judenrat in Vilna that they had to hand over Wittenberg to the Germans; otherwise, all of the Jews in the ghetto would be executed. Wittenberg decided to give himself up in order to prevent the people from paying for his actions. He was tortured to death in the Gestapo interrogation cellars. The rest of the underground's members decided to move to the forests next to Vilna, join the Lithuanian partisan organizations, and wait for an opportune time to take action against the Germans in the ghetto.

The first battles between the underground fighters and the German army broke out on September 1. The Germans suffered many more losses than they expected, and withdrew from the ghetto. The events were repeated on September 15, when the Germans planned to send 10,000 Jews from the ghetto to the death camps. The Germans learned from their intelligence service that the underground fighters had planted explosives all around the ghetto, and called off their operation.

At this stage, the underground fighters decided to leave the ghetto and join the partisans in the forests. A week later, a series of "aktions" completely destroyed the Vilna Ghetto.