Spiral of Time: Retrospective of Yiddish Heritage in Vilnius

Objects of Jewish life and Rare Archival Documents at the first Lithuanian exhibition to mark the 100th anniversary of YIVO

Part II. 

Opened in the beginning of March 2025 at the Vilnius Picture Gallery, part of the Lithuanian National Museum of Art, special exhibition You Shall Not  Make an Image. Commandments, Daily Life and Change ( March 5 – September 14, 2025) commemorates the 100th anniversary of the unique and legendary YIVO Institute that functions in New York from 1942 onward, but which has been conceived and established in Vilnius in 1925, where it worked before the Second World War and the Nazi Germany’s invasion to Lithuania. 

The exhibition is set on two large floors, presents a variety of objects, including ritual and daily life samples, parts of old synagogues, rare books and manuscripts, original art, and rare authentic documents. I have described the exhibition’s concept, people who worked on it, and the way of a wide and productive international cooperation on this effort in the Part I of this reviewing essay. 

The Way of the Presentation:  a Spiral of Time

It is not that easy to arrange as many as over 180 exhibits in the way that the exposition would be dynamic, but not too hasty, mindful, but not too static, and in the way that it would both provide enough space for visitor’s reflections and at the same time, it would keep visitor’s attention keen. 

Thanks to the exhibition’s curatorial team, its architect  Auste Kuliciute-Semene and designer Migle Datkunaite’s well-working vision, the exposition is true to a classic form , making a visible and articulated classical round, with similarly designed first and last rooms.  A spiral of time. 

Entering the exhibition, a visitor is impressed by huge authentic survived wooden elements of the 19th century synagogue in Pakruojis, immediately continued with unique books, including an incunabula, and rare manuscripts with striking history.

Dr Arunas Gelunas, the Director General of the Lithuanian National Museum of Art, before the opening of the YIVO commemorating exhibition at the Vilnius Picture Gallery. March 2025. (C) Inna Rogatchi.

After an engaging journey through many rooms on the two floors in the museum, a visitor ends his or her tour through five centuries of the Jewish history in Lithuania  annihilated by the Holocaust,  switching to the preservation of its memory in New York for decades. 

The only contemporary art work at the exhibition in Vilnius. (C) Gintare Grigenaite. LDNM.

This respectful and warming up path of remembrance ends in a huge, practically empty room with just three exhibits there: a huge wall-size contemporary work of the Lithuanian artist Egle Ridikaite , the only contemporary art work at the exhibition, presenting a part of the survived authentic floor of the Gelij Street Synagogue in a blown-up fashion, commanding not only the room, but in a way, the entire exhibition, beautiful large silver Hanukkiah from the Ziezmariai Culture Centre collection opposite it, and an exhibit of a part of the Torah, which was found after the war, and which destiny is still a mystery. 

Hanukkiah, silver, 19th century. Ziezmariai Culture Centre, Lithuania. March 2025. (C) Gintare Grigenaite, LDNM.

In both the first and the last rooms, authentic surviving parts of old Lithuanian synagogues are presented as dominating super-large elements, referring in a historical echo to the sad fact of history. Including a large contemporary artistic reflection to the exposition brings the pulse of our actual life today. 

Warmth as an unifying thread

Usually, there are two-three genres present at most exhibitions, either art and sculpture, or documents and books, or ritual subjects and artefacts. At the exhibition at the Vilnius Picture Gallery, surprisingly and productively, all those genres are present, in a well-maintained balance and rhythm. 

Public at the opening of the YIVO commemorating exhibition at the Vilnius Picture Gallery. March 2025. (C) Gintare Grigenaite, LDNM

Observing this multi-genre exhibition, I felt a palpable warmth emanating from a number of certain exhibits. In such subjectively driven self-guidance of warmth throughout the both floors of the exhibition, I saw the exhibition as widely educating, but also as humanly warm. This is a rare outcome in the modern-day exhibition world. 

Rare artefacts & telling  documents 

Among many objects of ritual  Judaica and daily Jewish life presented in the Vilnius Picture Gallery, two attracted a lot of interest. Almost every single female of any age at the exhibition’s opening was trying a modern-day replica of a very rare artefact, Jewish woman silk hat with a silver thread made in the 18th century , which was exhibited next to the replica in the protecting box.

Interestingly, the master who produced the replica and who is regarded as the leading milliner in Lithuania today, noted that in the beginning of his work for the exhibition, he assumed that it would not be that difficult job, especially given the fact of existence of the authentic objects. “But I was mistaken!” – he exclaimed, being surprised. “ It actually turned out to be a very, very demanding job,  to make everything correctly in that 18th-century cap, in the way that all this would work properly, all those strings inside, the form, every detail of it”.  

Director of the Vilnius Picture Gallery Aiste Bimbiryte with a modern-day replica of a period artefact from the 18th century (C) Gintare Grigenaite, LDNM.

The neighbouring ready-to-try replica to the authentic 18th century hat of a Jewish woman proved to be a very well working bridge covering about three centuries effortlessly and efficiently, not a so-called Mona Lisa effect of the impossible crowds, hysterically selfing itself with that far away, not that big, poor portrait, which became the hostage of a poorly museum presentation, the Louvre or not the Louvre, and of the thoughtless arrogance of a mass culture in the worst meaning of it. 

Here in Vilnius, people were engaged and happy, interested and intrigued next to a sole very old  small cap from the 18th century, and they were learning a lot being able to hold a very well manufactured replica of the hat in their hands and examine it thoroughly. 

There is one exhibit in the category of the objects from a daily Jewish life that became an instant attraction to everyone visiting.  That special interest was caused certainly by difference in a culture codes in daily Jewish life in New York and Europe. We all were glued to a large enough panel from some Jewish home in New York which celebrated in a rather home-made way somebody’s silver wedding, a century ago, in the early 20th century. Even the way in which a hundred-year-old panel was cracked in a few places, is charming and very likeable,  and adds that persistent warmth that I’ve mentioned before.

Silver Wedding panel. Early 20th century. YIVO Archive. With kind permission. (C) Inna Rogatchi.

The trove of touching documentation, largely from the unique YIVO archive, occupies almost the entire second floor of the exhibition.

Selection of rare authentic documents from the YIVO Institute Archive at the exhibition in Vilnius. March 2025. (C) Gintare Grigenaite, LDNM

It is very interesting and magnetic, because it is authentic, and one is privileged to see not only the buildings which are not anymore, and which were hosting the wealth of Jewish Yiddish culture and life of generations, but, importantly, those people, true heroes with such a tragic, devastating destinies, even if they survived the Churban – as Elie Wiesel and actually all of the tiny quantity of the Yiddish-speaking survivors of the Holocaust preferred to call the disaster for years and years after war ended -, the members of the famous Paper Brigade, who were heroically, daily saving any bit they could of our  Jewish Yiddish memory, knowing very well what would be the ultimate price for their effort if they would be caught by those so-cultured monsters in the Nazi uniforms who commanded them before annihilating. 

We are seeing important Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzekever in several photographs that are speaking by themselves: ruins, books and human beings landscapes of the war. We are seeing his colleagues being overwhelmed by the destroyed piles of culture, knowledge, tradition – the life itself. We are seeing those crates with wealth of Jewish culture in Lithuania that has been massively looted by the special commission of the Nazis, with that diabolically thorough mode of organising everything, crime including, the crates which were sent to Frankfurt during the occupation and total looting of the YIVO Institute in Vilnius. The crates were found by chance in 1945 by the US Army, and sent to New York in 1947 where YIVO and its people had to relocate to the best they could from 1940 onward. 

Abraham Sutzkever at the ruined place of the YIVO Institute , Vilnius. 1944. The YIVO Institute Archive. (C). Inna Rogatchi

Real-time scenes, real people, real-time captured moments of torment, effort, life, tragedy and destiny.  Nothing can match these documented moments, no AI, no feature reconstruction. Real lives of real people breathe from those old shots of not  the best quality, understandably. But how precious they are to everyone who can hear a heart’s beat in those old photographs of those ones who had played a crucial role in the horrifying drama of the Jewish people in the 20th century.  

Members of the Paper Brigade going through piles of paper belonging to the YIVO Institute. Vilnius, 1944. YIVO Institute Archive. With kind permission. (C) Inna Rogatchi

To connect the historical objects and original art from one side, with the authentic archival documents from another in the exhibition that commemorates the 100th anniversary of an unique cultural and educational institution, was a very productive idea by the Vilnius Picture Gallery and the Lithuanian National Museum of Art curatorial team. It has placed the rich and dramatic story of Jewish and Yiddish heritage of Lithuania not in an academic capsule for a few, but in a natural context of subtly presented time-machine, not intrusive, but  substantial and family-like. 

And this feeling of a family story of over five centuries told by the You Shall Not Make and Image exhibition in Vilnius, stays with you for a long time after your visit to that rare treat of live history and warm art in Vilnius is completed. 

Review of the rare books and manuscripts at the exhibition is presented in the Part III of the essay. 

March 2025, Vilnius

IR ©.