The Zundelovitz Family — Association of Jews of Vilna and vicinity in Israel

The old synagogue in Jurbarkas (Jurburg) was a particularly large and magnificent wooden structure. Its construction was completed in 1790. It was about six stories high, and several thousand worshipers could gather in it comfortably. In July 1941, a few days after the German army occupied the Lithuanian town, the Germans and their Lithuanian henchmen gathered the remaining Jews after the first Aktia. A few days earlier, the rioters burned the Torah scrolls and smashed the beautiful Holy Ark and the bimah.

Jews were given a strange and very unconventional order: they were required to ascend to the Women’s Gallery (ezrat nashim), which was three or four stories high, and jump off. Whoever refused was beaten. They had no choice. The force of the jumps resulted in what the Germans expected - the gallery floor collapsed with a tremendous noise pulling the support pillars with it. The roof folded, and the entire building collapsed on its occupants. It was also the end of the ancient synagogue. Lithuanian neighbors were happy to collect the firewood for cold Lithuanian winter days.

Seventy-five years after that chilling event, David Zundelovitz, the sculptor and Israeli artist who originated from Lithuania, received an unexpected phone call: Israel's ambassador to Lithuania Amir Maimon was on the line informing him that a sculptor was sought to build an eternal monument in memory of the Jews of Jurburg.

Zundelovitz knew the town well. He had gone there with his father many times. The monument was conceived, designed, produced and built by three artists from one family - David Zundelovitz (67), a renowned sculptor, his daughter Anna (35), an architect and interior designer, and the son Greg (Gregory), an artistic creative director. The “Can” New Artists Collegium, founded by David Zundelovitz, took on the project. Currently, they are frantically working to fulfill the task, and erect a large-scale monument to unfold the story of the glorious Jewish community that once existed.

"Our connection with the city of Jurbarkas began at the beginning of the last century," said David. "My father and grandfather were born there, but my father moved to Kaunas when he was young. When the Germans arrived, the family attempted to escape north to Latvia but this turned out to be a mistake. The Latvians did not allow them to cross the border; the family returned to Kaunas and was sent to the Kaunas ghetto."

Miraculously, they managed to escape the horror of the Aktions, the deportations to the extermination camps, and survived until the ghetto was liquidated.  Seventeen members of the family were unlucky - most of the family was murdered during the ghetto liquidation.

“Father, his older brother and his wife were the only ones who survived. One aunt, Lydia, survived this inferno thanks to the fact that she and her husband were sent to Siberia by the Soviet authorities. Her sin was that she was married to a man rich enough to employ workers. This was reason enough for Joseph Stalin’s Soviets to send people to Siberia. Her son, now 95 years old, lives in Holon.”

David was born in Vilna five years after the end of World War II. He graduated in the art of sculpture at the Vilnius Academy of Fine Arts, and later became one of the most renowned and reputable artists in Lithuania. Many of his works glorify major sites in Lithuania and Israel, including the facade of the Lithuanian House of Representatives, and a statue of Dizengoff on horseback on Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv. "When I made aliyah to Israel, I started teaching at the Avni Institute of Art and Design, but after one of my students asked me who was Albrecht Dürer and none of the students could answer, I felt that this ignorance was too much for me," he said. For this reason he established the Basis Art School, an independent school teaching the art of sculpture, and later the College of Artists "Can" located in Beit Yanai.

He briefly told the family history to his children. Anna, the daughter, was not satisfied with her father's stories, and at the age of 12 decided to delve deeper. "We thought we were alone and it turned out we had relatives around the world. When at the age of 12, I heard I had uncles I would never meet, I insisted on finding other relatives in the world and that had been ‘hidden’ by the Soviet regime. My 95-year-old cousin later found a twelve-page letter in dense Russian written by David's uncle to his sister Lydia in Siberia containing chilling evidence of his last days in the Kovno ghetto.” He describes how they started burning the wooden houses and blowing up the stone structures, and how he and his family were forced to leave the attic where they hid due to the stifling smoke, and found refuge in the basement of a nearby building where he made a secret door behind which he hid his three children. When it was clear that the Germans were approaching, they left and started running in all directions. The uncle was sleeping at the time. If he had been awake, he wrote, he would have prevented this mistake. All the fugitives were killed by the bullets of the Nazi murderers on the fence.

A few managed to reach the bank of the river Naris, including himself and David's father. This was in July 1944, when the Red Army began to win victories and repel the German army. "When they made contact with Red Army soldiers, they heard a rumor about another man who managed to escape by crossing the river. He decided to go back and look for that man - it turned out to be my father," says David. "They found him exhausted after crossing a 300-400 meters wide river without even knowing how to swim ..."

Tragically, the murder of his wife and son in front of his eyes caused the father to lose his mind. He was hospitalized in a sanatorium in Vilna for two years. "When he was released, he went to the market and found the stall of a stamp dealer. He remembered that his brother was one of the greatest collectors in Europe. He approached and saw his brother's familiar seal on one of the stamps. He then lifted his eyes and saw that the white-haired man standing in front of him was his older brother. This story has been in the family for years. We knew they discovered each other after the war, but we did not know how until father remembered and told us."

The persecution of Jews in Lithuania began long before it was occupied by the German army in June 1941 as part of Operation Barbarossa. The Soviet Union, which occupied Lithuania under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, nationalized much of Jewish property, sending more than 5,000 Jews to Siberia. Thousands of Lithuanians committed acts of murder, sadism and humiliation, especially against religious Jews and rabbis. Public beard trimming was a routine event. Forty-thousand Jews were killed in the first days of the occupation.

Later the murders became more institutionalized, and most of them were carried out in killing valleys - in the forests outside the big cities. Lithuanian Auxiliary Police Brigades were actively involved in these murders. The Jews were taken to the woods on foot or by truck, forced to dig their own graves, undress, and then shot to death. Their comrades were forced to cover the bodies with dirt. Jewish clothes were sold in the markets of nearby towns, and their neighbors ‘inherited’ their homes.

Most of the Vilna community was murdered in the Ponar forest near the city. Few Jews were left in the ghettos to work in an industry that served the German war machine. They made shoes and boots for Wehrmacht soldiers. Ninety percent of community members were murdered. Outside big cities, thousands of Jews lived in small towns such as Jurbarkas. "They were not taken to the ghettos. Within a few days, the murderers killed thousands of Jews. There was not a single Jewish soul left in these towns," Zundelovitz said.

In January 2015, the Israeli Embassy in Lithuania was opened. The new ambassador, Amir Maimon, decided to start his term by visiting towns with Jewish history. When he arrived in Jurbarkas, he noticed that the place had an unprecedented and well-kept Jewish cemetery, and even heard that high school students came to clean the cemetery of accumulated leaf litter in the fall. He also saw that the place had a monument in memory of those killed in the killing valley. The mayors who accompanied the ambassador told him that not far from the square, in the town center, stood the destroyed synagogue.

Maimon asked the mayor ‘Why don't you call the square 'Synagogue Square'?” said Anna." To Maimon’s astonishment, his proposal was enthusiastically accepted and within three months all the bureaucratic obstacles bypassed and the square was named." On that occasion, the mayor asked the ambassador to find the well-known sculptor David Zundelovitz, and ask him to erect a monument in memory of the local community’s Jews.

Maimon hurried and called David.  Zundelovitz traveled to Jurbarkas to explore the site designated for the monument. "It became clear to me that the monument would be erected 15 meters from the house where my father was born. The circle was closed," he said.

Zundelovitz prepared himself for the task: "To build another memorial plaque you don't have to have me come from Israel. If you want something else that will not only talk about the Holocaust but also tell the story of the Jewish community, I am ready to cooperate. When one hears the name 'Lithuania' it should be not only immediately associated with the Holocaust but also with 600 years of rich Jewish life, with the cradle of Torah study. Jurbarkas also has a special story of its own."

Jurbarkas was a port city on the border of East Prussia, the last customs post before Europe, and therefore had a cosmopolitan character. At the end of the 19th century, about 7,000 Jews lived in the area. The construction of the ancient railway moved the trade lines from sea to land, the city lost its greatness and many left it. On the eve of the outbreak of the war, about 2,000 Jews lived in the city. A few survived, including the boy Arik Brick, later Aharon Barak, president of the Supreme Court, who was smuggled out of the Kovno ghetto and hidden by two Jurbarkas families.

“Lithuania is changing," said David and Anna. "While it is not possible to say that antisemitism has disappeared, on the other hand one sees such phenomena as the publication of a book that openly names the Lithuanian murderers. For the first time, Lithuanians declare being ashamed of their actions, and are no longer afraid to truly confess."

The monument itself consists of symbols conveying the artists’ message. A wavy surface of black basalt will be laid over a hundred square meters, simulating the river on the shore of which the city resides. On the monument will be engraved the family names of all the local Jews - 600 to 1,000 in number - in both Yiddish and English. The twenty two letters of the Hebrew alphabet will be engraved on a black basalt pillar.

"The idea is to bear witness to the fact that our nation knows how to read and write since its birth, and our Jewish culture is different from that of other people," Anna explained. “The profession of the people will also be engraved next to their name. It is meant to identify with past Jewish residents," Zundelovich said. In addition, the names of the Righteous Among the Nations, the townspeople who saved Jews, will be engraved as well.

In the center of the monument will be a symbol designating the center of spiritual life - a broken basalt form reminiscent in shape to the ancient synagogue. "I am thinking of engraving on it a passage from Kol Nidre - a prayer known throughout the world," the sculptor said.

The site will have scattered encoded electronic information centers to enable each visitor to scan the code and obtain information about another chapter in the community’s life. Optical fibers will surround the surface – dots permanently alight, like small memory candles commemorating those who perished. The monument will be crossed by a diagonal line of shiny black granite, pointing precisely towards Jerusalem. "To us it is a source uniting all monotheistic religions, and will unite them all," Anna noted.

Members of the Zundelovich family work collaboratively, with the work divided between the three. A fundraising campaign is currently underway for the project, which costs around 180,000 euros. "This is the cost of materials and the work only," David emphasized. "As a special contribution from our family, we will not ask for an artist's salary or any other payment for expenses."

The Association of Lithuanian Jews in Israel is one of the partners in this project, and assistance was received as well from the Good Will Foundation allocated by the Lithuanian government as compensation to the Jews. At the same time, a fundraising campaign from businessmen in Israel and Lithuania and Jews from Lithuania was begun.

"The whole story is utterly delusional," Anna concluded. "While I was trying to organize a family reunion of all the sons of Zundelovich from around the world in Jurbarkas, on the land of our ancestors, it became clear to us that the land of our ancestors wanted much more from us."

Source: Makor Rishon