Tsila Zak — Association of Jews of Vilna and vicinity in Israel

Tsila Zak is the Litvak architect who won the first contest way back in 1989 by the just-reconstituted Lithuanian Jewish Community under chairman Grigoriy Kanovich for commemorating the Great Synagogue site. A Vilnius Litvak on both sides, Zak was living in Stockholm then, and really didn’t want to submit an entry. Her mother had forwarded the information to her, but she felt it was too great a burden to take on, involving the entire Litvak people and their destruction in the Holocaust. At the last moment she had a change of heart and became convinced she must do something. She sent away for the full application package just a month before the deadline, and received one of those typical Soviet parcels, a large box wrapped in butcher paper, held together with twine. Inside they had sent her numerous actual photographs and other material about the Shulhoyf. Zak decided on the idea that a celebration of Jewish life made the Holocaust stand out all the more, and went for a simple design involving excavating part of the surviving space and commemorating with markers above at ground level. Her entry won, but as with so many cultural projects from that time, nothing came of it. She lived her life, moved from Stockholm to Tel Aviv where she eventually built back up her career as an architect and where she now lives, and then out of the blue in 2011 Vilnius mayor Artūras Zuokas contacted her by telephone with a plan to implement her Great Synagogue project.

In 2011 the Lithuanian government and the Vilnius municipality engaged archaeologists to dig on the other side of the primary school. The dig uncovered the base of one of the four central pillars of the main space in the synagogue. At that time talk still centered on a plan to fully rebuild the synagogue, with very little exposure of Zak’s original project. Zak’s updated proposal includes three-dimensional mock-ups of the synagogue as it was and as he plan envisages, along with some very rarely seen photographs of the original structure. It also has the support of some high-ranking former and current Swedish politicians, public figures in Sweden and Lithuanian politicians, including Artūras Zuokas of course, but also Andrius Kubilius, the head of Lithuania’s Conservative Party and the leader of the opposition in the current parliament.

“There’s something very deep about Litvaks and Lithuania, Lithuanians…” Zak muses, echoing the NOVA producer’s words earlier.

From: Lithuanian Jewish Community