Lost Jewish Worlds

Lost Jewish Worlds - Vishay

Josef Rozin

Lithuanian: Veiseijai.
A county town in the Seiny district, Lithuania

History of Vishay
Population
The Period of Independent Lithuania (1918-1940)
Vishay Under Soviet Occupation
The Holocaust
After the War
Sources and Bibliography

History of Vishay

Vishay is located in southern Lithuania not far from the Polish border, near Lake Anchia, in an area of large pine forests some 22 kilometers south of the district town Lazdei. Its origins trace back to an estate that belonged to Prince Galinski of Lithuania. In the first half of the sixteenth century, King Sigismund Stari permitted the construction of an ale-house and the holding of market days adjacent to the estate.

Following the third partition of Poland in 1795, the entire area west of the Nieman River, including Vishay, was annexed to Prussia, and, from1807 to 1815, Vishay was part of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw. In 1815, after the defeat of Napoleon, the area came under Russian control and later was incorporated into the Suvalki district. At that time Vishay became a county center, a status it retained during the period of independent Lithuania.

Population

Year	Number of residents	Jews	Percentage
1827	737	-	-
1897	1,540	974	63
1923	1,295	516 (130 families)	40
1935	approx.1,000	75 families	-
1959	1,513	3	-

The first Jews are thought to have settled in Vishay around the middle of the eighteenth century. By the eve of World War I, the community numbered about 200 families. The town's Jews earned a relatively comfortable living, primarily from commerce, crafts, fishing in the lake, and agriculture. A few Jewish families owned large estates. In 1872, a large fire damaged homes and property in the town. A second fire, in 1893, destroyed sixty Jewish homes and the large beit ha-midrash, the only one in the town. Jews from nearby towns rushed to the aid of those left homeless and destitute by the fire, sending urgent supplies of food and clothing. In time the razed houses were rebuilt, as was the beit ha-midrash.

In the latter part of the nineteenth century, the spiritual leader of Vishay was Rabbi Eliahu Margaliot, followed in 1890 by Rabbi Natan-Neta Klonimos-Kalman Kabak, author of Shalmei Nedava (Bounteous Supplication), published in Warsaw in 1904. In 1890, the General School for Jewish Boys was founded in the town under the supervision of Rabbi Kabak. His son, Avraham Kabak, became a Hebrew-language writer who is best known for his historical novel Ba-Mish'ol ha-Tsar (In the Narrow Path), on the life of Jesus of Nazareth. In one of his short stories, Be-Leil Hanukkah (On the Eve of Hanukkah), Kabak described Jewish life in his native town. Besides the rabbi's school, Vishay also had a heder metukan (religious elementary school), founded by David Bojarski, where Avraham Kabak was one of the teachers. Shortly after the establishment of the Zionist Organization toward the end of the nineteenth century, a Zionist society was founded in Vishay, and in 1898 its members exchanged letters with the Center of Correspondence in Kishinev. The Jewish-socialist Bund was also well represented among the community's young generation even before World War I.

Outstanding members of the community included Reb Mordecai Smolenik, the shamash (synagogue sexton), who was renowned for his expertise in the Mishnah and Poskim (Rabbinic authorities); A. Menahem Diskin, a well-known community activist and philanthropist; and Reb Shlomo Hirschl, the veteran melamed (tutor) of the town's children.

From 1885 to 1887, Dr. Ludwik Zamenhof, the inventor of the international language of Esperanto, resided in Vishay. While pursuing his profession - he was an ophthalmologist - Zamenhof wrote Lingvo Internacia (The International Language).

During World War I, Vishay was captured by the Germans. On April 1, 1915, the Russian army, in the course of its retreat, expelled all the town's Jews into Russian territory.

The Period of Independent Lithuania (1918-1940)

Renewal of the Jewish Community. Following the war, with the establishment of the independent state of Lithuania, only about half the Jews who had been expelled into Russia returned to Vishay. The government census of 1923 showed 516 Jews, or 130 families (as compared with 974 Jews at the end of the nineteenth century). Their number continued to dwindle (in 1939 only 75 Jewish families remained) as a result of urbanization processes and increasing emigration overseas, mainly by the young. Most of the emigrants went to the United States or South Africa, although some chose to settle in Palestine.

Economic Life. The major cause of emigration was the constant economic deterioration in the town, which had a serious effect on the Jewish community in particular. A number of factors contributed to the economic decline, notably the demarcation of the border with neighboring Latvia, which closed off extensive markets to the Jewish merchants, and the inflammatory propaganda campaign conducted by the Lithuanian Merchants' Association, Verslas, which called for a boycott of their Jewish business competitors.

Indeed, the bulk of the town's commerce was in Jewish hands. Even Jews who had previously been farmers turned to commerce and crafts upon their return from Russia. According to a government survey from 1931, twelve of the fifteen shops and businesses in Vishay (80 percent) were Jewish-owned. Of these, four shops sold textiles and fabrics; two were butcher shops; there were two restaurants; a pharmacy; and individual shops that sold shoes, sewing machines, iron goods and work tools. In addition, seven of the nine industrial plants that employed at least five workers were owned by Jews: a power plant, brick factory, saw mill, flour mill, shoe factory and two bakeries. The nearby river provided the energy for the flour mill and the power plant, which supplied electricity to most of the town. By 1939, only one fabrics shop remained, and the iron goods shop was also defunct.

A list compiled in 1937, of twenty-three Jewish craftsmen, mentions four tailors, three cobblers, three butchers, three ironsmiths, two bakers, two shoe stitchers, two carpenters, a stove maker, a knitter, a barber and one other. A few Jews continued to fish in the lake, selling their catch, which included lobsters, in the capital, Kovno. There was also a group of Jewish wagoners in Vishay. They transported goods from Kovno and the nearby towns to Vishay, while from the latter they hauled mainly agricultural produce and fish. The wagoners later banded together to purchase a large truck that was used to transport both goods and people.

Vishay lay in the heart of an agricultural area, and every Jewish family maintained a small household farm - a vegetable garden, fruit trees, some chickens, and a cow or goat - primarily for its own needs. In this period the town's Jews included two physicians and a medic. By 1939, only one physician remained.

In the early 1920s, a credit bank that granted small loans operated in the town. In 1929, a branch of the Jewish Folksbank opened in Vishay and soon had 116 members; but, by 1939, their number had shrunk to seventy. The first manager was Katz, followed by Mrs. Pressman- Brezhnitsky.

By 1939 there were eleven telephones in the town, five of them in Jewish houses.

Community Life. Following the adoption by the Lithuanian government of the Law of Autonomy for Jews, the first democratic elections for the Va'ad ha-Kehillah were held in 1924. The Va'ad, which functioned until the law's repeal in late 1925, dealt among other things with matters such as registration of births, marriages and deaths. The Va'ad's population ledger was damaged in a fire that broke out in 1924, but waslater restored, and is now preserved in the YIVO Archives in New York. In the period of independent Lithuania, a Hebrew elementary school of the Tarbut network operated in Vishay and was attended by an annual average of about sixty pupils. The first headmaster was Haim Schultz, followed by Kaplan. Many of the school's graduates went on to study in various gymnasia and some attended the Lithuanian university at Kovno. The town also had a library containing 700 books in Hebrew and Yiddish. An amateur dramatics circle, led by Avraham Shenkin, a barber by profession, produced plays for the community's enjoyment.

In 1924, as we have mentioned, another large fire swept the town, again destroying the beit ha-midrash, which had served as the com munity's only synagogue. It also housed the Jewish school and constituted the center of Jewish life in Vishay. A special committee was set up to rebuild the beit ha-midrash, and, in the summer of 1926, its members, headed by Rabbi Yosef Goldin, the community's spiritual leader, appealed to their brethren in the United States for donations. The building was in fact rebuilt and served the community until its final demise in the Holocaust.

Lively Zionist activity took place in Vishay in the inter-war period. The majority of the young people belonged to the Gordonia movement, which numbered an average of forty to fifty members a year. There was also a local branch of the Zionist sports association Maccabee. Among their other activities, the Zionist youth movements raised money for the Jewish National Fund (JNF) and undertook various projects (such as baking matzot for Passover), with the proceeds earmarked for the JNF. Fundraisers for Zionist campaigns of various types visited Vishay from time to time and were received favorably. Most of the Gordonia activists settled in Palestine, mainly in 1934-1935.

The community held elections and sold shekels for six Zionist Congresses, the sixteenth through the twenty-first (1929-1939). The largest number of voters was for the Nineteenth Zionist Congress (1935): fifty-eight townspeople took part in the election, of whom fifty-seven cast their ballot for the Labor Palestine bloc (Zionist-socialist), and one voted for the General Zionists.

In the twentieth century the town's spiritual leaders were Rabbi Nahman Koliadicki, Rabbi Avraham Resnick, and the last two, who perished in the Holocaust, Rabbi Yosef Goldin and Rabbi Yehezkel Goldschlak.

The volunteer fire-fighters' association, most of whose members were Jews, played an important role in the town. The association also sponsored an orchestra of wind instruments. The local cantors were famous, and their sweet voices led the services in synagogues throughout the area, together with the local synagogue choir.

Vishay Under Soviet Occupation

In the summer of 1940, with Lithuania's annexation to the Soviet Union, the factories and most of the shops in Vishay were nationalized. The main victims were the town's Jews, as most belonged to the middle class. The Hebrew school was also shut down, and youth-movement activity was prohibited.

In the same year the Folkshilf (the Red Help, or MOPR) founded a dramatic group (an artistic brigade), which, among other productions, staged Goldfadden's Bar Kokhba. The group performed at Lazdei during the celebrations of the October Revolution.

The Holocaust

On June 22, 1941, as the Wehrmacht launched its invasion of Lithuania, Vishay fell to the Germans. Before the day was out, anti-Jewish riots erupted in the town. Gangs of Lithuanians locked the Jewish males in the beit ha-midrash, letting them out every day to do arduous and humiliating forced labor - cleaning the streets, razing bunkers built by the Russians and the like. At night, too, they would frequently awaken the imprisoned men and abuse them. Of all people, the German town mayor in Vishay tried to lighten the Jews' burden (he was rumored to have become enamored of a local Jewish girl), but the Lithuanians informed on the Jew-lover and he was sent to the front.

On September 15, 1941, all the Jews - men, women, and children - were taken to the barracks on the Katkishkes estate, about 1.5 kilometers from the town, where a ghetto had been set up. Jews from Lazdei, Kopcheva, Rudemian, and local villages were also thrown into the ghetto. The ghetto was fenced off with barbed wire and strictly guarded by armed Lithuanians. Every day its occupants were taken to work. An employment office (Arbeitsamt) was set up in the ghetto. Members of the Jewish police and a few other Jews were placed at the head, but their powers were extremely limited.

Life in the ghetto was administered by a committee comprised of representatives of all the towns. Its head, a pharmacist from Kopcheva named Astrumsky, consulted with Rabbi Gerstein from Lazdei on all ghetto-related matters. At first the ghetto inmates received a daily ration of 200 grams of stale bread and 300 grams of potatoes (1 gram=.035 ounce), but as time passed the amounts declined. Ghetto inhabitants who had managed to retain a few of their belongings gave them to Lithuanian peasants in exchange for food. The lives and property of the ghetto occupants were at the absolute mercy of the Lithuanians. One Lithuanian policeman, fancying a pair of boots belonging to a Jew from Rudemian, simply shot the man and removed the boots from the body.

On October 30, 1941, the ghetto was sealed and its occupants were no longer taken to work. From afar Lithuanians carrying shovels could be seen, and the Lithuanian officer told the Jews that pits were being dug for them and that this would take a few days - this was the time they still had to live. Hearing this, many Jews tried to flee; they were shot by the Lithuanian guards. Some were killed, and many others were wounded and brought back to the ghetto. The chief of the Lithuanian Police came to the ghetto and told the inmates that trying to escape was futile. Wherever the foot of a German trod the soil, he said, the Jew was wiped off the face of the earth, and the day would come when no Jews would be left anywhere. In order to prevent further escape attempts, the Lithuanians locked the huts and sealed the doors and windows with nails and iron bars. The occupants were trapped inside without food or water, but about 180 managed to escape on the first two nights. On the third day, November 3, 1941, the Jews were removed from the huts, stripped naked and led to pits some 300 meters from the ghetto. They were made to stand at the edge of the pits and shot. That day no one escaped. Although the orders for that Aktion came from the Germans,at the murder site they were only observers; the Lithuanians carried out the assignment.

Many of those who escaped from the huts were killed by peasants. Others were caught and imprisoned, and when their number reached thirty-five they were taken to the mass grave and murdered. Only six of the Vishay Jews who escaped from the huts were rescued by Lithuanian peasants (the rescuers' names are in the Yad Vashem Archives in Jerusalem) and survived the war. In addition, two Lithuanian peasants, Zharnauskas and Labulis, rescued two young girls from Vishay, the Fridkovsky sisters, and, for their kindness, were murdered immediately after the war by Lithuanian nationalists. The pharmacist Kukliansky and his family were also rescued with the help of Lithuanian peasants. Kukliansky`s son would become a professor of law at the University of Vilna.

Dr. Y. Levinson, a Jewish physician from Vishay, served as a military physician in the Lithuanian Division of the Red Army, reached the rank of colonel, and after the war became a lecturer in medicine at Kovno University.

After the War

Shortly after the war the few survivors from the towns whose Jews were murdered at Katkishkes set up a memorial monument at the mass graves to commemorate the 1,535 Jews from the Lazdei district - men, women, and children - who were slaughtered by the Nazis and their Lithuanian henchmen. The Vishay community in Israel established a memorial for their brethren in the Chamber of the Holocaust on Mount Zion in Jerusalem.

A survivor from the Polish town of Grodno, Dr. Felix Zandman, immigrated to the United States and became an inventor and important industrialist there, in Israel, and in other countries. He named the electronics concern he established Vishay in memory of his beloved grandmother Tema Freydovicz, who was born in the town of Vishay, and the Jewish community there that had been annihilated in the Holocaust. The electronics plants he established in Israel also bear the same name.

In 1959, there were three Jews living in Vishay, but no Jews were reported in the census polls of 1970, 1979, and 1989.

Sources and Bibliography