Publishers and Translators of German Philosophers 2014
On the 23rd of September, 1943 the Vilna Ghetto was liquidated, about two years after it had been set up by the Germans. The Jews who were left in the ghetto were either deported or exterminated at the nearby Ponary forest. Hundreds of years of Jewish history in "Jerusalem of the North" or "Jerusalem of Lithuania", as Jewish Vilna was called, ended in violence and inhumanity. So many cultural treasures that came from "Yiddish Land", especially from Vilne, the Yiddish name for the capital of Lithuania, Vilna, as it is known today, are not reflected in the current literary and theatrical scene there. The publishing industry before the war reflects the great interest that readers took in Yiddish literature, as well as in the Yiddish translations of European writers in general and German writers, in particular. Reading, especially within the ghetto, contributed greatly to spiritual survival.
In Vilna, Dr. Elka Kotovski and Stephan Kummer (the grandson of a Lithuanian Jew) from the Moses Mendelson Center for Judeo-European Studies at Potsdam University, with the support of the Lithuanian Ministry of Culture, the Lithuanian embassy in Germany and the Center for International Culture in Vilna, organized an exhibition of the publishing houses and the translators of books by German philosophers into Yiddish. The exhibition was first displayed in the library of Humboldt University, Berlin in October 2013. It was then moved to the halls of the Duisburg Jewish community. The creators of the exhibition were given the opportunity to translate it into Hebrew in 2014; thanks to Mickey Kantor and other members of the Association of Jews from Vilna and Vicinity in Israel, they managed to display the exhibition at Bet Vilna in September that year. A catalog, based on the previous exhibition, was published in German in 2017.
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