Eastern and Central Europe (Eyewitness Travel Guides)

(Ben Green) #1
VILNIUS 55

State Jewish


Museum q
Valstybinis Vilniaus Gaono
Žydų Muziejus


Pylimo 4. Map C3. Tel (5) 212 7912.


9am–1pm Mon–Fri. & 8 excur-


sions of the museum & Vilnius Old
Town offered. http://www.jmuseum.lt


The hub of the city’s now tiny
Jewish community, this small
museum displays copies of
ghetto diaries and handwritten
notes on the backs of ciga rette
packets about life in the
ghetto, as well as items that
rem ained from the museum
that existed before World
War II. Several objects that
mir acu lously survived from the
Great Synagogue, demolished
by the Soviets, include a Ten
Commandments bas-relief.
The building plays host to a
news paper in Lithuanian,
English, Yiddish and Russian,
Jerusalem of Lithuania. It is
also the venue where groups,
such as the Union of Former
Ghetto and Concentration
Camp Prisoners and the Union
of Jewish War Veterans, meet.


The Museum of
Genocide Victims e
Genocido Aukų Muziejus

Aukų 2a. Map B2. Tel (5) 249 7427.
# 10am–5pm Tue–Sat, 10am–3pm
Sun. & 8 = http://www.genocid.lt

Also known as the KGB
Museum, the Museum of
Genocide Victims was opened
in 1992, on the first floor of
the former KGB build ing. In
the effectively designed
display area, personal stories
are used to reveal the regime
of terror under the Soviet
occu pations of 1940–41 and
1944–91. The exhibits here
chronicle Soviet repression in
Lithuania, the cattle-car

Exhibition of Lithuanian partisans at the Museum of Genocide Victims

deportations to Siberia and
the futile efforts of the Forest
Brothers, who fought a
guerrilla-style campaign
against the Soviet regime with
strong support from the locals.
Underground, the cells that
were in use right up until the
late 1980s are even more over-
whelming. They include the
smaller cells used in winter
with no glass in their win dows
and the floors covered with
water, as well as an exe cution
chamber display ing, under
glass, the recently exhumed
remains of victims of the era.
In 1997, the museum was
taken over by the Genocide
and Resistance Research
Centre of Lithuania, a state
institution dedicated to inves-
tigating atrocities that occurred
in the country during the Nazi
and Soviet occupations.

Holocaust
Museum w
Holokausto Ekspozicija

Pamėnkalnio 12. Map B2 and C2.
Tel (5) 262 0730. # 9am–5pm
Mon–Thu, 9am–4pm Fri, 10am–4pm
Sun. & 8 http://www.jmuseum.lt

Also known as the Green
House, this department of the
State Jewish Museum reveals
some of the horrors that
befell the Jews of Lithuania
during World War II. A display
on Jewish life before the terror
unfolded is followed by maps
and photographs of how and
where the Holocaust was
executed. There are also des-
criptions of the harsh life in
the ghettos and eyewitness
accounts of the mass killings of
100,000 people in the forests
of Paneriai, outside Vilnius.

rebuilt to replace an earlier
Baroque version. A site of
pilgri mage, it was one of the
first stops made by Pope John
Paul II when he visited
Lithuania in 1993.


Stained-glass window at the State
Jewish Museum


Holocaust Museum, annexe of the
State Jewish Museum
Free download pdf