Channels

Photo: The Shtetl - The Living History Museum of the Jewish World
Yaffa Sonenson Eliach on the day the German army entered Eishyshok. Taken at the family summer home
Photo: The Shtetl - The Living History Museum of the Jewish World

Bridge to the past

Celebrating 10 centuries of vibrant Jewish life

“We should be recalling the vibrant life of previous centuries,” believes Dr. Yaffa Sonenson Eliach, a pioneer of Holocaust studies in America.

 

The retired Brooklyn College professor, and a visiting professor at many universities, says she can't understand “why our focus has been on death and destruction, and not life,” adding that for too long, visual images of the Holocaust and Eastern European Jewry have focused on the dead.

 

A frequent visitor to Israel, Eliach, an elegant petite woman in her late 60s and grandmother of 14, travels the world, meeting with popes, presidents, mayors and community leaders.

 

Her goal is to celebrate the lives of those who perished, recalling communities and the togetherness in shtetls across Eastern Europe – particularly in her own village which, at times, belonged to Poland, Lithuania and Russia.

 

Although Eliach was born in Vilna, Lithuania, in May 1937, her family lived in Eishyshok (Eisiskes, Ejszyszki), Poland (now Lithuania). A witness to the murder of her mother and two infant brothers, she is one of only 29 survivors of the massacre of 35,000 Jews in September 1941. Some 1,500 Eishyshok Jews had immigrated to the United States from 1873-1940.

 

In 2000, she produced a film with the survivors, and brought 58 people, including survivors, children and grandchildren, back to Eishyshok. “Some were afraid, but I convinced them,” she says, adding that it was necessary to show how they rebuilt their lives, after the war.

 

The descendant of Eishyshok’s five founding families (Ben-Yossef, Ben Asher, Azrieli and two whose original names were lost) who arrived from Babylonia in the 10th century, Eliach says that ancient stones in the old cemetery, dated 1097, attested to their origin. Her paternal grandmother, Hayya Kabacznik Sonenson, was the descendent of Ben-Yossef; Ben Asher (Asherowitch, Yurkanski) and Azrieli (Azrielowitch). The Senitski and Shimshelewitch families are descendants of the remaining two.

Yiddish-speaking, the village followed Ashkenazi customs, except in its Provence synagogue melodies and Sephardic Hebrew – traditions brought by the first Torah reader centuries ago.

 

In early Lithuania, the last pagan country in Europe, Jews lived on equal terms surrounded by pagans, Christians and Moslem Tartars.

 

Eliach organized the three-story Tower of Life, at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, filled with 1,600 photographs (taken in Eishyshok, 1890-1941), illustrating Jewish life and culture prior to the massacre. More than 23 million people, including 7 million students - most not Jewish - have seen it.

 

Her current project is the recreation of Jewish village life by her Shtetl Foundation in Rishon-le-Zion on 123 acres (492 dunam) donated by the city and the State of Israel – on the empty southwest corner of what is Israel’s fourth-largest city. Called “only sand, perhaps good for a golf course,” she envisioned another future for the space and the project is enthusiastically supported by Rishon’s Mayor Meir Nitzan.

 

Based on the working village concept – like Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, which annually attracts millions of visitors – the Living Shtetl will span 10 centuries of Jewish history, Ashkenazi and Sephardic. When complete in 2010, some 80 buildings, populated by a cast of several hundred “residents,” will be open.

 

Although plans are based on maps and Eliach’s research of Eishyshok, buildings from many different villages and traditions will be incorporated, and the project will serve as a time bridge to our ancestors’ vanished world, bringing to life 1,000 years of culture and tradition. Visitors will be able walk its streets, visit houses, shops, the market square – all impossible since the war.

 

In 1998, after 20 years of research during which Eliach tried to find and interview every Eishyshok survivor, she authored an 800-page book, There Once Was a World: A 900-Year Chronicle of the Shtetl of Eishyshok, displaying the heart and soul of the community, with photographs of individuals, families, businesses and intimate daily life. It is the blueprint for the Living Shtetl project.

 

She traveled to six continents, family attics and dusty archives, searching for a people, a place, a culture. Her academic research skills in history and genealogy recorded the rich shtetl life, and showed, surprisingly, that the “world of our fathers” was really where women ran businesses and home.

 

Proceeds from her book sales and lectures are donated to the Shtetl Foundation, and fundraising for the first phase, requiring USD 25 million, is ongoing; USD 100 million is needed in total. Surprisingly, most funds come from younger Americans who are fascinated with the Jewish past.

 

Eliach contacts everyone around the world who can help fund the project; her card file is a Who’s Who of Jewish world movers and shakers.

 

The groundbreaking for the first phase in January 2005 was for the Forest of Life, dedicated to 1.5 million children who perished, and to the successes of those who survived, such as former Israeli chief rabbi Israel Lau, renowned author Eli Wiesel and even Rishon’s Mayor, Nitzan, including such groups as the Teheran Children, who were brought to safety. This initial phase will also include the synagogue courtyard, the Schulhoyf, with recreations of the famous Eishyshok and Olkenik synagogues.

 

The second phase will have a structure modeled on the ancient Lithuanian Castle of Trakai, housing the museum, archives, library and arts center – the gateway to the Shtetl.

 

The final phase will create working village shops and the study center. Eliach envisions courses for students and adults, education seminars and conferences for Israelis and international visitors, along with lifecycle and holiday events, lectures, concerts, theater and film. Permanent and temporary exhibits will document religious leaders, scholars, writers, laborers and artisans; the role of women; Hasidism, Haskalah (Enlightenment) and Zionism.

 

From the Castle, visitors will view the village across the water, cross the bridge to the synagogues, where they will be able to pray, celebrate births, bnai mitzvot and weddings, according to shtetl tradition.

Among the buildings: Rabbi's House, Yiddish School, Heder, Yeshiva, Hebrew School, Public Bath and Mikvah, the Cemetery (House of Eternity), where memorial services will be held. Narrow lanes with medieval houses, more modern streets and larger homes, will lead to Market Square, framed by businesses, where visitors may participate in artisan crafts, such as Pharmacy, Photographer, Firehouse, Book Shop, Bakery, Barber Shop, Tailor, Seamstress, Shoemaker and Doctor.

 

The Jewish farmer’s life will be seen in straw-roofed farm houses in fields grazed by sheep, cows and chickens.

 

Eliach speaks to Jews and non-Jews, emphasizing the long history of tolerance in Eishyshok, among Christians, Tartar Moslems and Jews. To Moslem groups in Washington, DC and at the University of Miami in Florida, she spoke about the cooperation between Eishyshok’s Jews and Moslems, and the existing Moslem community, about which little is written; “No one comes to us,” they tell Eliach, and it is an unknown part of Lithuania’s contemporary cultural history. She adds, “the Moslems didn’t collaborate with the Germans, they were neutral during the war and saved Jews.”

 

Her audiences say, “We never knew.”

 

Only a few weeks after the death of Pope John Paul II, on May 18, 2005, Eliach opened an exhibit on the Pope and his relationship with the Jews, at Ohio’s Xavier University.

 

She had visited with the Pope in the Vatican, receiving his blessing for the exhibit, which documents his life, Jewish friends and relationships with Jewish families.

 

While Eliach was researching her book, Hassidic Tales from the Holocaust, she heard about a young Polish priest who had refused to baptize the hidden Jewish baby of a Catholic woman. He told her to return the baby to its American relatives, which she did – the young priest became Pope John Paul II.

Exhibit visitors comment “We never knew,” as they learn about togetherness and tolerance.

 

Eliach lived in Eishyshok until the Germans invaded, murdering almost everyone after Rosh Hashanah 1941. Saved by her Polish nanny, she rejoined her family, which had managed to escape, surviving by hiding in many places, including ground pits under farm buildings. She witnessed the deaths of two brothers and her mother, Zipporah Katz. Her father, Moshe Sonenson, was sent to a Siberian prison but reached Israel in 1956. In 1946, she and her uncle Shalom managed to get into Israel from Egypt, and her brother Yitzhak reached Haifa. Married at 17, Yaffa and her husband, Rabbi Dr. David Eliach moved to Brooklyn, where he was principal of the Yeshiva of Flatbush.

 

More information: www.shtetlfoundation.org; or write: Shtetl Foundation, 300 E. 54th St, Suite 23K; New York, NY 10022; There Once was a World: A 900-year Chronicle of the Shtetl of Eishyshok (1998).

 


פרסום ראשון: 02.07.06, 00:08
 new comment
Warning:
This will delete your current comment