Wooden Synagogue of Olkieniki

The Jewish community

Jews settled in Olkieniki as the town developed into a local trading centre in the eighteenth century. In 1790 there were 273 Jews among about 949 inhabitants, and by 1897 the community had grown to about 1,126 of 2,619 people. That same year of 1790 the congregation met and demanded a new synagogue to replace one that had burned, and the great wooden synagogue went up by 1801. A smaller synagogue followed in 1880. The community's rabbis are remembered in its memorial book. Reb Shmuel, remembered as the last chief rabbi of Vilna, served as district rabbi, and Reb Aba Josef Treywash left for Vilna after a dispute over a question of kashrut. Reb Yakov Levin sat on the rabbinical seat for more than fifty years. Between the world wars Olkieniki belonged to Poland, in Wilno province, and on the eve of the war about 1,000 Jews lived there.

Architecture and design

The synagogue was a large log building of massive pine beams, each about 60 centimetres thick and more than 10 metres long. Its roofs rose in overhanging tiers, which reminded survivors of a Chinese pagoda and which the memorial book calls the typical synagogue style of the period. The engraving in the Brockhaus and Efron Jewish encyclopedia shows this tall stepped roof mass above plank walls and lower annexes. Inside, the walls were panelled in pale wood that, the memorial book says, never darkened. The Torah ark carried four decorative panels with moving mechanisms that showed the seasons, the signs of the zodiac and the festivals, calculated through the Jewish year 6006. At the centre stood a three-storey bimah on eight pillars, topped by a carved eagle with outstretched wings and a crown. The encyclopedia illustrated the bimah and ark as well as the building.

Life inside the synagogue

The great synagogue was the pride of Olkieniki. Its best-known possession was the Torah curtain embroidered in gold and silver with the words "Gloria et Patria" and weighing more than three kilograms. Local tradition said that when Napoleon passed through the town on his way to Russia in 1812, he ordered a piece cut from the cloth under his saddle and gave it to the community. The townspeople refused to sell it, even when Baron Ginzburg offered a large sum. The curtain was illustrated in the Russian Jewish encyclopedia of 1906–1913 as a notable treasure. The memorial book also records the rabbis who led worship in the synagogue. Among them was Reb Yakov Levin, who arrived around 1874 and served for more than fifty years before settling in Jerusalem, where he died in 1927.

Destruction

Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet-held Lithuanian territories on 22 June 1941. On 25 June 1941, Rosh Chodesh Tammuz, a Nazi German bomb struck a Soviet fuel tanker standing in the town's market. The fire that followed destroyed about a quarter of Olkieniki, including the great wooden synagogue and the house of study. The memorial book records that the synagogue was erased in this fire. Wikipedia's account of the town also states that the synagogues were burned in the first days of the German occupation of Lithuania. The Napoleon curtain and the carved ark and bimah were presumably lost with the building. Nothing of the synagogue survives.

The community’s fate

Olkieniki's Jews were murdered within three months of the German invasion. In September 1941 they were taken to Eišiškės (Eishishok), where the Jews of the surrounding towns had been concentrated. There, around 400 Jews from Olkieniki were shot by Rollkommando Hamann, the mobile killing squad of Joachim Hamann, with Lithuanian auxiliaries, together with the Jews of Eišiškės and other nearby towns. The memorial book says that up to 1,000 people from the shtetl perished at Eišiškės. Only five Jews from Olkieniki survived the war, four of them hidden by friendly Lithuanians. The community was never re-established, and its memory was preserved in the memorial book published by survivors and emigrants.

The site today

Nothing of the synagogue survives in Valkininkai, now a small town in Varėna District, Alytus County, Lithuania. It stood in the town centre, which burned in a fire that began in the market in June 1941, but its exact plot has not been identified in the sources consulted for this entry. The building is known from the illustrations in the Brockhaus and Efron Jewish encyclopedia and from the descriptions in the Olkieniki memorial book. A modern CAD section drawing based on older paper sources also exists.

Notable names