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Shnipishki Jewish Cemetery

Olimpiečių St. 1, 09200 Vilnius, Lithuania

The first Jewish cemetery in Vilnius, established in 1487 and closed in 1831. It is now inactive. The area covers the entire territory where the current Sports Palace stands, which was built directly on the cemetery grounds. The cemetery land was originally legally purchased by the Jewish community and belongs to it. (After Lithuania regained independence, despite new laws, the deed of sale-purchase for the land on which the cemetery is located has never been revoked.)
Lithuania: Vilnius: Ruins of the Lithuanian Jerusalem
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Jermaine
The Snipishok Jewish Cemetery is the first Jewish cemetery in Vilnius, established in 1487 and closed in 1831. It is now inactive. The area covers the entire territory where the current Sports Palace stands, which was built directly on the cemetery grounds. The cemetery land was originally legally purchased by the Jewish community and belongs to it. (After Lithuania restored its independence, despite new laws, the sale-purchase deed of the land plot on which the cemetery is located has never been revoked.) It has been under state protection since 2014.
The first Jewish cemetery in Vilnius was established in 1487, and a mention of it has been preserved in a document dated 1592. In 1831, the cemetery was closed for burials. Later, in 1930, it was completely closed. The cemetery was the burial site of many prominent figures of Jewish culture, including the Vilna Gaon (read here: https://reveal.world/story/vil-nyusskij-gaon-genial-nyj-myslitel-i-velikij-issledovatel). After the pogrom in 1919, his grave was moved to the new Sudervė Jewish Cemetery.

In 1949–1950, the graves were liquidated. When its destruction began, the remains of Eliyahu ben Shlomo Zalman along with the remains of his students and relatives, as well as V. Pototsky (Ger-Tsedek) (read here: https://reveal.world/story/neveroyatnaya-istoriya-grafa-pototskogo-stavshego-evreem-i-sozhzhennogo-za-veru) were transferred from it to the Sudervė Cemetery. Among those buried in the cemetery was Rabbi Avraham Danzig (1748–1820), whose most famous work continues to be studied daily in Jewish religious schools and academies worldwide.
In 1955, most of the necropolis was demolished. In the 1980s, during the construction of the Sports Palace, an additional large part of the graves was destroyed, and all external boundaries of the cemetery were removed. The history of the cemetery was suppressed until 1996, when archaeological excavations were conducted on the site and graves of Jewish children were found near the Sports Palace.
In 2006, part of the cemetery was built over with the "Mindaugas" apartments, causing an international scandal. Many prominent rabbis worldwide opposed the plans to build a congress center, including Shlomo Zalman Auerbach, Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, Tzvi Rothberg, deans of American yeshivas, members of the Kotler and Feinstein rabbinical dynasties, and many others who also protested and requested that the cemetery grounds be used "exclusively for prayer and sacred reflection." The Israeli Minister of Religious Affairs, Yitzhak Cohen, also spoke out. The statements of many high-ranking Israeli leaders caused a significant international resonance, and Lithuanian authorities postponed further destruction of the cemetery. For opposing the construction of the congress center on the cemetery grounds, the head of the local Jewish community, Faina Kukliansky, dismissed Chief Rabbi Chaim Burshtein. After his dismissal, in response to his persecution, Chaim Burshtein revealed a secret American diplomatic dispatch containing information about a 2009 agreement between the Committee for the Preservation of Jewish Cemeteries in Europe and the Lithuanian government regarding the terms of the development project. The correspondence mentioned Faina Kukliansky herself, who met with the British ambassador and US embassy staff, supported the Committee's plans, and requested $100,000 USD. The Committee also demanded as little publicity as possible for flexibility. On August 26, 2009, the Director of the Department of Cultural Heritage, together with the CPJCE committee and the Jewish Community of Lithuania, signed a non-public agreement on the cemetery boundaries, but in 2015 this agreement was leaked to the media.
On October 19, 2011, a swastika was painted on the monument at the cemetery site. In 2014, Culture Minister Šarūnas Birutis announced that the cemetery was now under state protection, but already on February 12, 2015, Prime Minister Algirdas Butkevičius decided to convert the abandoned Concert and Sports Palace into a Congress Center with a section for the Museum of Litvaks (Lithuanian Jews) history. This caused strong criticism from Jewish religious organizations due to the violation of Jewish tradition, which forbids disturbing the resting remains of the dead. In 2015, the Lithuanian government began a project to destroy the cemetery and build a development project worth 25 million euros on it. In August 2017, US congressmen wrote to Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaitė, urging official Vilnius to abandon the construction of the congress center on the cemetery site, but Lithuanian authorities did not abandon their plan. The US congressmen specifically noted:
The cemetery is a historical monument of enormous cultural significance for both the local and international Jewish community and therefore must be preserved. A petition protesting the project was written by Vilnius native and resident Ruta Bloshtein, which gathered about 50,000 signatures. Jewish activists asked the administration of US President Trump to intervene. The London Committee for the Preservation of Jewish Cemeteries in Europe also opposed the desecration of the cemetery. On December 30, 2018, Israeli Interior Minister Aryeh Deri appealed to the Director of the Lithuanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, calling for serious measures in connection with the threat of desecration of the old Jewish cemetery in Vilna in Piramont (today’s Snipishok). In addition to him, ten other members of the Israeli Knesset made the same request.
Thus, today there are every reason to believe that attempts to build over the Jewish cemetery will continue. It is not worth trusting Lithuanian authorities who claim the importance of preserving the local Jewish cultural heritage.

Sources:
https://lt.sputniknews.ru/20170816/evrejskoe-kladbishche-ostavit-nelzya-zastroit-3685000.html
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Шнипишкское_еврейское_кладбище


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Jermaine

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