Vilna, Lithuania – A new office block going up in Vilnius seems like any other project in this booming city, but the local Jews are angry.
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They say the work is on the site of an ancient cemetery, and the dispute has reopened old wounds and accusations of anti-Semitism in Lithuania, where the Nazi Holocaust wiped out a Jewish community of more than 200,000.
“This was a very special place,” said Mordechai Gurwicz, 84, as he wandered slowly around the area of the 600-year-old Snipiskes cemetery, or Shnipishok in Yiddish.
He recalled his imprisonment in the Vilnius ghetto during World War Two, escape, fighting with partisans against the Germans and, in the Soviet era, emigration to Israel.
His memories include rabbis from all over Poland taking part in the burial of old Torah scrolls in the 1930s, when Vilnius belonged to Poland and was called the “Jerusalem of Lithuania”.
Protests over the cemetery, the final resting place in 1797 of the Vilna Gaon (genius), a world famous Jewish rabbi and scholar, have come at home and from abroad, including a letter from US Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. [reuters]
there goes some clinton pandering. maybe machshayfa is a chusid and she is going to pardon the Gra for what he did to chasidim?
The Gaon’s kever was moved, it’s not there now, rather in another cemetery.
they have more important things to worry about, like concerts,dress codes, indian shaitlech and copepods. or maybe their handlers haven’t told them yet about this.
WHERE ARE ALL GEDOILE LITA FROM THE HANTIGEN DOR????????
WHY DONT WE HEAR THEIR VOICES???