Shnipishock. Or, in Lithuanian, Šnipiškės. The very name conjures images of the centuries-old history of the glorious Torah kingdom of Lithuanian Jewry. At one time, in the early 1800s, Shnipishock was the largest bais hachaim in Lithuania. It was built at the edge of town, hundreds of years ago, in a serene area overlooking the Neris River that runs through Vilna and all the way to Kovno, where it meets the Nemunas River.
The cemetery held the greatest gaonim of those generations. It was the original resting place of the Vilna Gaon and the ashes of the Ger Tzedek of Vilna, Valentine Pototzki, who was mekadeish Sheim Shomayim in public on the second day of Shavuos in 1749. He was burned at the stake a mere number of yards from the Grand Vilnius Hotel where I stayed my first night in Vilna. It is ironic that the Grand Vilnius Hotel, now host to so many bnei Torah who visit Vilna in search of the holy roots that were planted here hundreds of years ago, or who come to advocate for those who lie in the cemeteries of Lithuania that are in jeopardy, is so close to the infamy that cries the story of our endless persecution in Lithuania.
It is always a difficult feeling to spend a night resting merely a hundred yards from where one of the most infamous auto-da-fé took place. But when it comes to Vilna and most other Eastern European countries that were seized by the Nazis and their collaborative tentacles, it is probably impossible to go anywhere that falls outside 100 yards from where a heinous crime was committed.
I joined Rav Elchonon Baron on the trip for a reason. It was not only to connect and be inspired by the world and places from where my father’s family and the family of my wife’s parents came, but to understand the severity of the problem that was and continues to exist regarding the cemeteries of Lithuania. If there is any way to aid in the mission of stopping the further neglect and desecration of these sacred places, and the whitewash of history that makes these desecrations even easier, and advocate for recognition, respect, and restoration, then it will certainly be worth every bit of time and effort.
Truth be told, every Jewish cemetery, whether or not gedolei Yisroel or simple Jewish neshamos are there, must be treated with the utmost reverence. Indeed, Shnipishock is special. The Chofetz Chaim related that during the formation of the Vaad Arba Aratzos, Vilna applied for a unique independent status. They wanted to be counted as an independent member of the Vaad Arba Aratzos with a simple argument: Vilna claimed to have three hundred and thirty-three gaonim within the city. The vast number of these brilliant Torah minds gave it the status of an ihr v’eim b’Yisroel. Those are the gaonim who inhabit Shnipishock, but their remembrance is lost to a plowed field, pavement, and an ugly eyesore. But truthfully, when it comes to the concept of the severity of the sanctity of a Jewish cemetery, it makes no difference who is buried there.
About 400 years after the first recorded burial, the Šnipiškės cemetery closed in 1831. There simply was no more space, and thus burials began at the Zaretche Bais Hachaim, where out of the 70,000 neshamos buried there, the only matzeivah that I was able to see, is that of the relatively recently erected matzeivah of Rav Boruch Ber Leibowitz. Perhaps there were a few more scattered in the overgrowth of a forest that the evil ones missed, I did not see them.
What happened to Shnipishock? About 100 years after the final burial at the Shnipishock cemetery, the Lithuanian government thought, “It’s a century later. No one will care.” They began their plans to desecrate the land. They wanted use of the land. The cemetery was originally consecrated at the edge of town, but as the city grew, the Šnipiškės cemetery became closer to the middle of town. That was prime real estate. The Lithuanians wanted to erect a stadium, something that the Russians eventually did.
Rav Chaim Ozer Grodzensky, in his capacity as the chief rov of Vilna, intervened vociferously. No such desecration of a Jewish cemetery could be allowed by Jewish law and would not be accepted by the Lithuanian and worldwide Jewish community. The Lithuanian-Polish government back in the 1930s was willing to spare the burial sites of the famous rabbis on the condition that the Jewish community would agree to allow them to demolish the remainder of the cemetery, where “simple Jews” were buried.
Rav Chaim Ozer ruled out any such compromise and instead engaged in a tireless, worldwide lobbying campaign to persuade the government officials to rescind their decree. World War II stopped all of those plans, but it did not spare the cemetery. The ultimate entry of the victorious Soviet Union into Lithuania and making it their satellite state was a death knell for the Jewish cemeteries of Lithuania.
Although the Russians allowed the ultimate transfer of the Vilna Gaon’s remains together with Rav Chaim Ozer’s and some other gedolei Yisroel to the Jewish cemetery on Suderve Street, there is nary a zeicher of both the Shnipishock and Zaretcha cemeteries. They removed every tombstone and left no remnant of remembrance that this was once hallowed ground.
The first time I was in Vilna a number of years ago, I was told that we were going to visit one of the largest cemeteries in Lithuania. In my mind, I pictured a cemetery as a large, multiple-football-fields-sized area filled with matzeivos, thousands of tombstones that marked the final resting places of the Yidden buried there. Perhaps it would be overgrown and forlorn like the cemetery in Warsaw, but I did not realize the reality of the cruelty.
When I arrived, I was shocked. I saw land the size of several football fields. However, there was not one single matzeivah in sight. Not one. Not even a symbolic tombstone. A massive and equally ugly amphitheater-like structure that I was told served as a sports arena sometime back in the 1970s stood aside a giant cement patio next to the stadium.
On the edge of the cemetery property were two large apartment houses that were built by the Lithuanians, who cared not for the Jewish ownership of the holiest real estate in Diaspora Judaism. Nothing else was done to remind people that they are walking on an area that was once bought and owned by the Jewish community of Lithuania.
Last week, when I visited Shnipishock for the second time, everything seemed the same as it did three years ago. The decrepit stadium, however, had more broken windows, and the weeds had grown larger and larger on the hideous cement field that lay before it. I imagine that the large patio was once trodden by thousands of sports fans trampling over the resting places of Klal Yisroel’s greatest luminaries.
The only reminder that the sacred ground we walked on was indeed the menuchas olamim for some 50,000 souls was a mid-sized and hardly prominent monument stating that this was the cemetery. The small memorial plaque in Lithuanian, English, and Hebrew basically names a few of the prominent residents of the cemetery, reminds visitors that this place is the old Jewish cemetery in Vilnius, and requests them to be quiet in the place of eternal rest.
Despite the fact that at no time was there a transfer of cemetery ownership to any entity—not to the Nazis, not to the Communists, and not to Lithuania when it became free of the Soviet occupation in 1991—there is really no marker that recognizes the fact that Shnipishock is private property. Currently, there is still great consternation regarding the Lithuanian government’s plan to build a Museum on the site of the old stadium. Such a building, which would require earthworks, plumbing, digging, and other desecration, would certainly be sacrilegious defilement.
The depressing scenes did not end in Shnipishock. The next bais hachaim we visited was the Zarecha Cemetery on Olandiu Street. Indeed, it was equally dismal, but there were some rays of recognition. At the entrance to the cemetery, there is a configuration of matzeivos. They are stacked up against each other as if to say, “These great stones once belonged here. They were stolen by the Soviets and Lithuanians as steps for their homes and palaces, but now they are coming back.”
We walked a bit further and saw, guarded by a chain-link fence, piles of discarded tombstones. Perhaps guilt had set in and people began bringing back these holy stones that once marked the resting places of holy Jews and then were desecrated to become part of the masonry of a Communist’s home.
We finally came to the only functioning cemetery in Vilna, the cemetery in Suderve. It was established within a non-Jewish cemetery, and the earliest tombstones from original burials there are not earlier than the 1930s. There are even matzeivos with dates as late as the 1990s in that cemetery. The kevorim that were salvaged from the imminent destruction of the original botei kevaros in Vilna were brought there, but they are only a tiny fraction of the niftorim who passed away in Vilna and have proper recognition of their burial site.
Despite the terrible destruction and disregard in the Vilna cemeteries, there was a ray of hope in a bais hachaim in a small suburb of Kovno where the least expected of characters shed a ray of light in a very apathetic and even contentious, country.
