The Vilnius municipality is preparing proposals for renovating the old Užupis Jewish cemetery in Vilnius. The municipality’s planning agency Vilnius Plan has hired architect Victoria Sideraitė-Alon for this purpose and she has performed an examination of the territory and has provided proposals on how best to showcase fragments of headstones desecrated by the Soviets.
Sideraitė-Alon’s creative group (Samuel Bak is the author of the main symbol, A. Šimanauskas is the creator/designer, A. Perelmuter is the Israeli architect and consultant) has proposed a project called Arch, which was unanimously approved by an international advisory group on heritage issues established at the Lithuanian Jewish Community and by artists and intellectuals including P. Morkus, M. Ivaškevičius, S. Beržinis, S. Valius and by the Jewish Religious Community and the Lithuanian Foreign Ministry.
The Arch project proposal has not received the approval of the Vilnius Plan agency, which instead proposed a different project to commemorate the road blazed through the cemetery during the Soviet era, actually more of a ditch, called Kirkuto alley, but without any monument carrying a deeper semantic or emotional content. Instead, the alternate proposal is for arranging the headstones and fragments, more or less appearing now as stairs, in an artificial layer of soil above the parking lot where they are now housed to create the effect of a small “Jewish” graveyard there.
The cemetery is the final resting place for a number of remarkable Vilnius Jewish figures from the period between 1830 and 1940, including the Romm family, Rabbi Grodzenski, Tsemakh Shabad, Jakob Wygodski and the Bunimovitch family, and even the Vilna Gaon’s mortal remains were temporarily moved there after the destruction of the Šnipiškės cemetery, and later removed to the Sudervės road Jewish cemetery in Vilnius.
Although between 30 and 40 percent of burials were disturbed and destroyed during the Soviet era when the road/ditch and a funeral home facility were built, the remaining graves are intact.
All Vilnius Jews who care about the future of this Jewish sacred site are invited to a meeting at 11:00 A.M. on April 27 at the Lithuanian Jewish Community to discuss the Community’s position on the future project with the members of the Vilnius Plan agency.