VILKAVISKIS
a small town in Southern Lithuania
Where the Jewish Community is no more
With the help of material from the magnificent article by Josef Rosin I am attemting in the following pages to give some small picture of Jewish communal life in Vilkaviskis before it was all tragically destroyed in the summer of 1941.
Culture
In the years 1918-1919, at the initiative of the "Bund" and "Poalei Zion-Smol" who dominated the community committee, many cultural institutions were established. They organized the "Kultur Lige" (League for Culture), a popular university, a Yiddish school, a consumer cooperative, the trade union of the brush workers, which became the center of all brush workers in Lithuania and also a sick fund. All these institutions existed till 1926, when they were closed together with the liquidation of autonomy, when the nationalist party began to rule in Lithuania.
In 1925 a branch of the association "Libhober fun Visen" (Supporters of Knowledge) was founded in Vilkovishk, which established a library with 1,500 books in Yiddish. Next to it was a reading room where lectures on different themes took place. There was also the Zionist-Socialist "Sirkin Society", which maintained a large library in Hebrew and Yiddish.
The Jewish theater from Kovno often presented its plays and so did the "Hebrew Studio", which existed only for a few years.
In March 1939 "The Artisans Association" arranged a big party in the big hall of the cinema, where the play "Two Kuni Lemel" was performed with great success.
There was also "The Society of Jewish ex-soldiers who fought for the independence of Lithuania" with its 25 members
 
 
This site was created by Ralph Salinger
of Kibbutz Kfar Ruppin. Israel