I spend a lot of time in cemeteries. It’s part of the gig: I’m a rabbi. And my Hebrew name — Avraham Yitzhak — is common enough that I often see myself on gravestones, an eerie reminder of the liturgy we’ll recite this Rosh Hashana: “A man’s origin and end is from dust.”

But last month, I came face to face with my actual name : Avram Mlotek. There it was, on a stone right next to that bearing the name of my grandfather, Joseph Mlotek.

I found their legacies in Vilnius, a city that once teemed with Jewish life. For centuries before World War II, it was called the “Jerusalem of Lithuania” and bustled with synagogues, schools and Yiddish writers. Jews of my generation often know much about how these ancestors died, but little about how they lived. Going to Vilna, as it is known in Yiddish, was a reminder of that vibrancy. It was also a painful reminder that culture alone is not enough to protect a people.

The Mloteks, though, were not longtime residents of that dynamic city. When they came to town it was because they were running for their lives.