Yiddish literature, poetry and texts from 160 years ago found in Lithuanian church

For decades, a confessional in a church in Lithuania’s capital Vilnius kept a precious secret: a trove of documents offering an unprecedented glimpse into Jewish life in Eastern Europe before and during the Holocaust.

The cache, with documents dating back to the mid-18th century, includes religious texts, Yiddish literature and poetry, testimonies about pogroms as well as autobiographies and photographs.

“The diversity of material is breathtaking,” said David Fishman, professor of Jewish History at New York’s Jewish Theological Seminary, describing the discovery as a “total surprise”.

“It’s almost like you could reconstruct Jewish life before the Holocaust based on these materials because there is no aspect and no region and no period that is missing,” he added.

The trove was discovered earlier this year during a cleaning of the church that was used as a book repository during Soviet times.

The documents, together with a larger cache found in Vilnius nearly three decades ago, are “the most significant discovery for Jewish history since the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the 1950s”, Mr. Fishman said.

Treasured manuscripts

Among the most treasured finds are several original manuscripts of poems written in the Vilnius ghetto by celebrated Yiddish poet Avrom Sutzkever, including the haunting To My Brother.

“We had the versions that he reconstructed from memory and published right after the war,” Mr. Fishman said of Sutzkever, who survived the Holocaust.

“Now we have the manuscripts that he actually wrote in the ghetto and there are differences — that was a very powerful find.”

An 1857 agreement between the Jewish water carriers in Vilnius and the city’s famous Ramailes rabbinic Talmudic academy, or yeshiva, offers a telling insight into everyday life 160 years ago.

In exchange for copies of the Bible and Talmud, the yeshiva agreed to let the water carriers use a room for prayers on the Sabbath and holidays free of charge.

After occupying Vilnius in 1941, the Nazis destroyed the Jewish community and plundered its cultural wealth.

Jewish poets and intellectuals were coerced by the Nazis in the Vilnius ghetto into selecting Yiddish and Hebrew books and documents for an institute in Germany.

The Germans sent a portion of the plundered texts to Frankfurt, but the Jewish archivists risked their lives to hide a vast array of precious documents from their tormentors.

Soviet trouble

After the war, a Lithuanian librarian, Antanas Ulpis, intervened to save those documents that had survived the Nazis from the country’s new Soviet occupiers, who were bent on destroying them as part of dictator Joseph Stalin’s anti-religious purges.

Ulpis deftly hid some of the manuscripts “under a pile of Soviet journals — that’s why no one bothered to look, that’s why they weren’t discovered sooner,” said Renaldas Gudauskas, director of Lithuania’s National Library. There they remained untouched for decades in the confessional in St. George’s Church that the Soviets used as a book repository after the war.