Vilna Ghetto II on Shemini Atzeret? The Date Does Not Hold
Yad Vashem’s Vilna exhibition and a Vilna memorial association place a 3,000-person Aktion on Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah. Yad Vashem’s own ghetto encyclopedia dates the relevant liquidation action to October 15–16, after the holiday; Pinkas Hakehillot gives the same civil dates while mislabeling the holiday, and the Jäger Report records a City of Wilna shooting on October 16.
This year, Shemini Atzeret begins at sundown on October 2, 2026. I went looking for what appeared to be another Vilna Holocaust date written into Jewish sacred time.
On September 14, I wrote Lithuania’s Holocaust Chronology Skips Yom Kippur 1941. That date holds. Yom Kippur 5702 ran from sundown September 30 into October 1. Yad Vashem dates the Aktion to October 1, and Herman Kruk’s contemporaneous diary describes Jews in prayer shawls running through the streets as the prayer houses emptied.
The Shemini Atzeret story looked as if it belonged beside it. It does not survive the same test.
Between Rosh Hashanah and Shemini Atzeret
The people later seized from Ghetto II had already been living through catastrophe for weeks. Pinkas Hakehillot, a Yad Vashem publication translated on JewishGen, records 8,000 Jews murdered at Ponary in the Great Provocation of August 31–September 3. It records that Lithuanians, under German command, shot the prisoners at the pits. Karl Jäger’s killing ledger (English translation in Ernst Klee, Willi Dressen and Volker Riess, eds., “The Good Old Days”: The Holocaust as Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders, pp. 46–58) separately records 3,700 Jews from the City of Wilna shot on September 2 and preserves the killers’ stated pretext in its own words: “sonderaktion because German soldiers shot at by Jews.” On September 6, as the ghettos were created, thousands were diverted to Lukiškės Prison; Pinkas records that about 6,000 of them were taken to Ponary and shot on September 10 and 11. Yad Vashem’s online ghetto encyclopedia (in Hebrew) instead states that about 6,000 additional Jews were taken to Ponary and murdered on September 6. Jäger’s next City of Wilna shooting entry is September 12: 3,334. Pinkas and the encyclopedia therefore conflict on the date attached to those roughly 6,000 victims. About 30,000 Jews were crowded into Ghetto I and 9,000–11,000 into Ghetto II.
The move itself was dispossession. Pinkas Hakehillot describes people driven from their homes with only what they could carry; thousands were diverted to Lukiškės Prison, and the property of those later murdered was confiscated. Inside the ghettos every room, corridor, storeroom, attic and basement became living space. Some people slept in courtyards. Others moved into apartments whose occupants had just been taken to Ponary. Hunger “reigned throughout the ghettos.” Special arrangements had to be made for orphaned children whose parents had died in the mass executions.
Rosh Hashanah 5702 began at sunset on September 21. On September 22, its first day, Jäger’s ledger records 1,159 Jews shot at Novo-Wilejka, on the edge of Vilna. A Vilna memorial timeline attributes additional killings to the holiday period, but its chronology does not fully match Jäger: the ledger dates the murder of 575 Jews at Jašiūnai to September 25, after Rosh Hashanah.
Then came Yom Kippur. Yad Vashem’s online ghetto encyclopedia (in Hebrew) records about 2,200 Jews arrested in Ghetto I and about 1,700 in Ghetto II on October 1. Pinkas Hakehillot records that several hundred were released through workplace intervention or other means and that all the others were taken to Ponary and killed. Pinkas and Yad Vashem’s encyclopedia both record Lithuanians alongside the Germans that day. The day did not arrive for an intact community. It arrived for people already missing parents, children, spouses and siblings, already living in rooms emptied by earlier selections, already learning what Lukiškės and Ponary meant.
There was almost no interval. Pinkas records another roughly 2,000 Ghetto II inhabitants sent through Lukiškės Prison to Ponary on the night of October 3–4.
Sukkot was not spared elsewhere in Lithuania. On October 6, its first day, Jäger records 962 Jews shot at Semeliškės. On October 9 he records 3,726 at Švenčionys. Neither was a Ghetto II killing.
Survivors of the Vilna ghettos described the conditions. Sara Voloshin-Klibatz remembered twenty-five people in two rooms and a ration of 100 grams of bread per person per day. She remembered her mother crying as the family was uprooted overnight, packages scattered as people stumbled toward the ghetto gate, and the pain of being robbed of her home. Shoshana Shorenzon remembered four to eight families in a small apartment and a shortage so severe that, at fourteen, she slipped out to beg food for her grandparents and great-grandmother. Her father and brother had already been killed. These testimonies describe life in the Vilna ghettos; they do not prove that either girl was in Ghetto II during the October 15–16 Aktion.
By Shemini Atzeret, the remaining Jews were hungry, crowded, dispossessed and bereaved. They had watched people disappear from prayer houses, apartments and work lines. Children had become orphans. Parents had lost children. Families had been reduced between one holiday and the next.
Yad Vashem also carries the holiday date
The holiday attribution is not confined to the Vilna association. Yad Vashem’s Vilna exhibition says the second Ghetto II Aktion “took place on Shmini Atseret and Simchat Torah” and says that, according to Jewish sources, about 3,000 people were taken to Ponary. The Association of Jews of Vilna and vicinity in Israel carries nearly identical wording. I cannot establish from those pages which text came first, so I will not invent a chain of copying. Yad Vashem’s exhibition and Yad Vashem’s own ghetto encyclopedia give incompatible accounts of the same Aktion.
The same exhibition is useful evidence for the Yom Kippur Aktion because that event is independently corroborated. Its authority does not change the calendar.
The 1941 Diaspora calendar is straightforward. Shemini Atzeret ran from sundown October 12 to nightfall October 13. Simchat Torah ran from sundown October 13 to nightfall October 14.
Yad Vashem’s own encyclopedia says October 15–16
Yad Vashem’s online ghetto encyclopedia (in Hebrew) dates the three October actions that liquidated Ghetto II to October 3–4, October 15–16 and October 21, and estimates approximately 8,000 Jews murdered in those three actions. That chronology places the disputed Aktion after Simchat Torah had ended.
The perpetrators kept another kind of record. The Jäger Report, dated December 1, 1941, records for the City of Wilna on October 16: 382 Jewish men, 507 Jewish women and 257 Jewish children, 1,146 people in all. It records 1,983 on October 4 and 2,367 on October 21. Pinkas Hakehillot records Germans and Lithuanians inspecting every house and hiding place during that final October 21 Aktion.
Jäger cannot tell us when the October 15–16 roundup began. His ledger has no Wilna entry for October 1 either, though the Yom Kippur Aktion is independently documented. His dates are execution entries, not a complete calendar of arrests. The ledger therefore fixes only what it actually records: a City of Wilna shooting on October 16.
Its number also differs from the approximately 3,000 in the Jewish sources. I do not know whether the records are counting different stages or populations, or whether one tally is incomplete.
Pinkas gives the civil dates and mislabels the holiday
Pinkas Hakehillot, a Yad Vashem publication translated on JewishGen, dates the approximately 3,000-person Aktion to October 15–16, but labels those dates Simchat Torah and “Succoth’s Isru Khag.” In 1941 Simchat Torah ended at nightfall on October 14. October 15 was Isru Chag. October 16 was an ordinary Thursday. The civil dates and the holiday label cannot describe the same two days.
The strongest defense of the holiday attribution is that arrests began as Simchat Torah ended on the night of October 14 and continued into October 15–16. I have not found a source reviewed for this article that says so. Pinkas’s civil dates are October 15–16; only its holiday label points backward. Yad Vashem’s ghetto encyclopedia gives October 15–16. Jäger records the shooting on October 16. The exhibition’s holiday attribution is therefore not supported by the chronology I can verify.
The crime does not need the wrong holiday
Nothing here makes the destruction of Ghetto II uncertain. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum states that German Einsatzgruppe detachments and Lithuanian auxiliaries destroyed Ghetto II in October 1941 and killed its population at Ponary. Pinkas Hakehillot describes the division of labor at Ponary: members of a Lithuanian TDA battalion under German Security Police command transported prisoners from Lukiškės and guarded the killing ground while Ypatingasis būrys carried out the murders. Yad Vashem’s Hebrew encyclopedia also identifies Ypatingasis būrys as a 150-man Lithuanian volunteer unit used in the annihilation of Vilna Jews. Pinkas does not say which men fired on October 16. The question here is narrower: whether the approximately 3,000-person Aktion belongs on Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah.
A wrong date carried by trusted institutions becomes an avoidable gift to anyone who wants to use one error against an entire record.
In Moonlight at Ponary I kept conflicting accounts of Tzerna Morgenstern’s murder separate because the disagreement did not erase her murder. It limited what I could responsibly say about disputed details. The same rule applies here.
The Jewish record contains the evidence to correct itself. Yad Vashem’s own ghetto encyclopedia gives October 15–16. Pinkas gives the same civil dates while mislabeling the holiday. Yad Vashem should reconcile its own records, beginning with the exhibition page. Three thousand Jews taken from Ghetto II do not need a holiday coincidence to be remembered. They need the date the evidence can carry.
* * *
Filmmaker’s note
I co-directed and produced Baltic Truth, on the destruction of Baltic Jewry and local participation. I am now directing and producing Ashes of Identity, examining October 7, resurgent antisemitism, and the ways misinformation, propaganda and historical revisionism normalize hatred.
These projects begin from the same obligation: facts must remain facts, including when the correction runs against a Jewish institution. Failure to confront historical falsification, denial and normalized distortion leaves societies more vulnerable to future genocidal violence.
Independent documentaries require independent supporters. Contributions help complete production, expand international filming, license archival material, and bring the film to audiences through festivals, educational screenings, streaming, television and universities. U.S. donations are tax-deductible through the project’s fiscal sponsor, the Israeli-American Civic Education Institute, a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Please support Ashes of Identity.
About the Author
Eugene J. Levin is the founder and president of Dim Bom Productions, LLC, a film production company dedicated to powerful storytelling and historical truth. Born in Riga, Latvia, he immigrated to the United States in 1989. He is the producer and director of the award-winning Holocaust documentary Baltic Truth and is currently creating Ashes of Identity.
