The Jews of Seduva were murdered 84 years ago. Now a new museum will commemorate their shtetl way of life - The Jewish Chronicle

Eighty four years ago more than 600 Jews – men, women and children – of the shtetl of Seduva in rural Lithuania were executed in the forest outside the town. Now the finishing touches are being made to a museum which will commemorate the shtetl way of life which was extinguished in the Holocaust – not just in Seduva or Lithuania, but all over Eastern Europe.
The Lost Shtetl Museum will use cutting-edge technology to recreate the sights and sounds of everyday pre-war Jewish life, based on the history of Seduva and more than 200 similar small Lithuanian towns – and the thousands more communities in neighbouring Latvia, Belarus, Poland and Ukraine which were wiped off the map forever.

The opening date of September 20 is significant, preceding Lithuania’s Holocaust Remembrance Day by just 72 hours. Yet the true date of the yahrzeit for Seduva should be a month earlier, according to Dr Jolanta Mickute, head of education at the museum,

She says the Jewish residents of the country’s rural shtetls were among the first victims of the Nazis, aided by local collaborators in the summer of 1941: “The Jewish community of Seduva was executed in Liaudiškiai forest over two days, August 25 and 26 - 664 men, women and children.” It was the second mass murder of the town’s Jews that month, following the initial slaughter of 150 men including the town’s last rabbi, Mordechai Henkin, in neighbouring Pakutenial forest .

Seduva's restored Jewish cemetery (Photo:Liucija Kavalskiene /Lost Shtetl Museum)[Missing Credit]

The victims were honoured by the descendants of survivors at an opening dedicating the building as a memorial site to the lost community. They were preceded by President of Israel Isaac Herzog, whose ancestors also hailed from Seduva. He came on August 5 to affix a mezuzah to the door in a country where tens of thousands were lost when the buildings they were supposed to protect were destroyed following the annihilation of their occupants.

Herzog was accompanied by the museum’s designer, Rainer Mahlamaki. The Finnish architect created a single building whose exterior would resemble a shtetl from afar, evoking an entire townscape including the silhouette of a synagogue. A memorial park beyond recreates the landscape which surrounded the community for the 300 years it grew and flourished.

Construction teams who laboured for seven years to complete the complex included builders and landscapers not only from Lithuania, but Poland, Finland, Switzerland, the Netherlands and the US. The permanent exhibition was designed by Ralph Appelbaum Associates, who have worked with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as well as the Smithsonian, British Museum and Imperial War Museum to convey narratives about traumatically disrupted cultures of the past.

While commemorating the lost Jews of Seduva and nearly 200,000 who perished in other parts of Lithuania, the aim is to celebrate the contribution of the country’s Jews to its economy and culture and those of their descendants. A key aspect of the content will be the photographs, maps, written records and video testimonies telling the moving stories of past inhabitants which have been gathered over the years.

The lucky ones emigrated before the Second World War many going to South Africa like the ancestors of textile artist Carole Smollan. She incorporated images of her great-grandmothers’s visa among other family memorabilia in the miniature Torah mantles she was inspired to make after visiting Seduva in 2001.

Torah mantle by Carole Smollan featuring a picture of her great-grandmother's emigration visa - Lost Shtetl Museum, (photo: Carole Smollan)[Missing Credit]

“They were carried by Jewish travellers who thought they might not get home for Shabbat,” explains Smollan, who is based in London and creates symbolic items of Judaica from challah covers to chupot, including one commissioned by the Board of Deputies. Her entire collection of miniature Torah mantles has been acquired by the new museum, including those featuring the visa image, and Smollan comments: “It’s strange this document has returned to the original family home 100 years after it was issued.”

Torah mantle by Carole Smollan featuring her great-grandmother's visa, now in Lost Shtetl collection (Photo:Carole Smollan)[Missing Credit]

The museum, which will be free to visit, has not been without its controversies. It was conceived by poet and essayist Sergey Kanovich who presided over the restoration of the Seduva Jewish cemetery in which 800 of the 1300 gravestones dating from 1812 to 1936 discovered on the site were restored and preserved. He then came up with the idea of a museum dedicated to the Jews who had lived in the town for centuries: “commemorating them by telling their history via the personal stories we had uncovered.

“I thought this would serve as a memorial to all the other extinguished shtetls because one can murder people, but memory is stronger than bullets, and it must prevail.

“It we are to expect any empathy or sorrow for the whole of the Litvak culture lost in the Holocaust we should clearly show what has been lost; without it our victims will remain nameless and meaningless numbers.”

Lost Shtetl Museum exhibition[Missing Credit]

However, after 12 years working on the development, Kanovich left earlier this year, citing a “fundamental disagreement between my vision of what this museum should be and the vision of some powerful people involved.”.

He added: “But I wish this institution the best of luck.”

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Lithuania