Wooden Synagogue of Jurbarkas

The Jewish community

Jurbarkas, a river port on the Neman beside the East Prussian border, had a large and long-established Jewish community. Its two main streets, Jewish Street (now Kaunas Street) and Raseiniai Street, were lined with Jewish shops and craftsmen's workshops. The community built its great wooden synagogue in 1790 and, a century later, a masonry synagogue beside it that also served as a winter prayer house, study house and religious school. The Yurburg memorial book stresses the community's pride in its institutions. Besides the famous synagogue, it kept a Hebrew gymnasium open to rich and poor alike, something larger and wealthier towns lacked. The memorial book, compiled by survivors and emigrants, describes a lively town of religious, educational and cultural institutions in the interwar Republic of Lithuania, which the German occupation of 1941 destroyed within months.

Architecture and design

The synagogue was a large log building of several storeys. Its main prayer hall rose to a massive block topped by a series of stepped, overhanging roofs, with carved boards along the eaves. On the front, a lower two-storey annex carried an open wooden gallery on each level, framed by carved posts and balustrades, with the entrance below. Michał Elwiro Andriolli's drawing of 1872 shows the building from the corner, with the tall central mass and its tiers of roofs, the galleried front and a plain side annex. Photographs taken around 1915 show weathered log walls, paired windows and the gabled galleried porch, with a crowd of townspeople in front. Inside, Jewish craftsmen carved the Holy Ark with wild animals, birds and plants. There were also a carved Chair of Elijah for circumcisions and an elaborate bimah. The memorial book calls its style that of the Middle Ages.

Life inside the synagogue

The great synagogue was the pride of Yurburg and a place of pilgrimage for visitors. The memorial book recalls that many people came to see it and that its pictures were distributed all over the world. It served as the town's main house of prayer for over 150 years. The adjoining masonry synagogue of 1886 provided a heated winter prayer hall, a study house and a religious school. The community's rabbis led worship there up to the war. The last of them, Rabbi Haim-Ruven Rubinstein, was forced by the occupiers in June 1941 to hand over his own writings and books to be burned. The synagogue was also a subject for artists. Andriolli's engraving appeared in books about his work, and wartime German photographs made it one of the best-known wooden synagogues of Lithuania.

Destruction

Nazi Germany invaded Lithuania on 22 June 1941, and Jurbarkas, on the border with East Prussia, was occupied immediately. On 28–29 June 1941 the Torah scrolls and books of the Jewish community, including the rabbi's writings, were heaped in a yard and burned. According to the survivors' account on the Yurburg KehilaLinks site, the Jews were then ordered to destroy the synagogue themselves, to tear down its walls and hand over everything removable to the local Lithuanians. The Lithuanian Jewish heritage survey states that the Nazi occupation forces ordered its destruction in the summer of 1941. The memorial book says that in September 1941 the synagogue was set on fire and destroyed. The destruction was ordered by the Nazi German occupiers and carried out with Lithuanian collaborators, who also murdered the community.

The community’s fate

The Jews of Jurbarkas were murdered within three months of the German invasion. On 3 July 1941 the Gestapo chief Böhme, with 30–40 Germans who came from Smalininkai (Schmalleningken) and Lithuanian collaborators, shot 322 Jewish men and a few women and children at the Jewish cemetery. On 21 July about 45 elderly people and coachmen were shot on the Raseiniai road. On 1 August about 200 women and children were murdered by Lithuanian activists in the Švančiai woods. In early September 1941 German and Lithuanian police rounded up and murdered the remaining Jewish population. Almost the entire community was killed. In 2018 memory stones were laid for the Berkover family, and in 2019 a memorial square was opened on the site of the synagogues.

The site today

Nothing of the wooden synagogue survives. It stood on Kaunas Street, formerly Jewish Street, in the historic Jewish quarter of Jurbarkas, together with the later masonry synagogue. In 2019 the Synagogues' Square memorial was opened on the site, with work by the sculptor Dovydas Zundelovičius. Nearby, eleven memory stones laid in 2018 commemorate members of the Berkover family murdered in 1941. The synagogue is known from Andriolli's drawing of 1872, published in 1904, and from photographs taken around 1915 and postcards of the 1920s.

Notable names