Chanukah in Wilno

David Plotz

I awoke on January 1, 2006, at 9:00 AM. Well, it was 9:00 AM in New York, anyway. I was seven time zones east in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, where I had spent the previous night chugging champagne straight out of the bottle in a medieval town square surrounded by inebriated strangers. Vilnius is far enough north that the sun was already setting by the time I woke up on New Year's Day. As if that wasn't disorienting enough, I was hit by a sudden realization as I stepped out of the shower. I realized it was the last night of Chanukah.

Having spent the previous two weeks in Kaliningrad, an obscure Russian exclave tucked between Lithuania and Poland, I had missed the first seven nights of my favorite winter holiday. Since the last week of December and the first week of January cover Western Christmas, New Year, and Eastern Orthodox Christmas in Russia, I had pretty much forgotten that Chanukah even existed. Fortunately, something in my biological coding reminded me in the nick of time.

Even more fortunately, Vilnius's old town is rather compact, such that the city's one remaining synagogue was only a few blocks away from my hostel. I emphasize "remaining" because Vilnius was once Wilno, "the Jerusalem of the North," a city with scores of synagogues and one of the greatest intellectual centers of Ashkenazi Jewry. Vilnius is also, incidentally, the closest I ever plan on getting to my family's old shtetl, which we abandoned for New York in the 1890s, about fifty years before it was wiped off the map by the Nazis.

So as the sun set, I hustled along the cobblestone streets to the one synagogue the Nazis missed, unsure of what I would find there. What had become of the once enormous Lithuanian Jewish community, whence came so many of our ancestors? I imagined myself nearly alone in the sanctuary, perhaps befriending a handful of elderly Jewish women engaged in silent prayer. Instead, and to my surprise, I arrived at a packed house. A panorama of post-Soviet Jewry was laid out before me, perhaps as many as a thousand of my distant cousins. Most of them looked rather secular and slightly confused. The women, with their perestroika-maroon hair, would not have looked out of place in an underground shopping mall in downtown Moscow.

Only the handful of Lubavitchers at the front of the room, instantly recognizable by their enormous frizzy beards and all-black ensembles, seemed to know what was going on. Before the service began, I approached them and introduced myself. I was not especially shocked to learn that they all had Brooklyn (and in several cases, Columbia) connections. They had elected to lead a congregation of apathetic Sovietized atheists in celebrating the miracle of Chanukah, perhaps introducing a few of them to Orthodox Judaism in the process. They all gave me their cards.

I had to admit, they put on a great show. Local and national government leaders, Jews from multiple countries, and a representative of the Catholic Church were all invited to light candles during the service. The Lubavitchers arranged for a brilliant guy about my age to translate the service into Lithuanian, Yiddish, Hebrew, Russian, and English. Some of the locals got into the act too, singing traditional Hebrew songs like Ma'otz Tzur in Russian translation and performing what I assume were Lithuanian folk dances. After the service, everyone was treated to a free buffet from Vilnius's one kosher restaurant, including jelly donuts, latkes, and "authentic Lithuanian gefilte fish," which was stuffed into actual fish heads (I took one home to the hostel).

Somehow I had imagined that my presence at the synagogue would be as exciting for everyone else as it was for me. Here I was, the world-traveling, vaguely bilingual New York Jew with Litvak roots, generously gracing my ancestral homeland with my presence on the last night of Chanukah. What could be more romantic? I felt about ten times the contrived nostalgia that I felt when I visited the Western Wall in 2000. But really, most of the Jews in the place couldn't have cared less. I had a few nice conversations with the locals, I was pestered by the Lubavitchers, and otherwise I remained safely anonymous. I don't know if I was expecting to get invited up to the bimah as a special guest, but I would have enjoyed a bit of extra attention.

But I can't really blame my distant cousins for being unimpressed with me. They've had a very different century than my family had. While my family spent the past five generations climbing the American social ladder and generally avoiding anything more controversial than whether to stay in New York or move to the suburbs, those who stayed behind experienced three Russian revolutions, World War I, the Soviet invasion of 1939, the German invasion of 1941, the Holocaust, and nearly five decades of Soviet rule, not to mention the shock of entering a market economy. The story of Jewish resistance to foreign oppression has a particular resonance in Vilnius that it sometimes lacks on the Upper West Side.

Plus, their gefilte fish is better.

DAVID PLOTZ (CC '06) is an editor for The Current, The Birch, and AdHoc. He is also a senior writer for The Blue and White and a former Spectator columnist. He is majoring in Eastern European History.