Klibansy, Ben-Tsiyon, Beyond the End, 2025 — Association of Jews of Vilna and vicinity in Israel

The work “Beyond the End” is written about a historical figure—the pedagogical director and educator at the Jewish girls’ orphanage in Kovno—who ended her life walking with her pupils toward the killing pit in October 1941.

The protagonist, Chaja-henė Zyvaitė, was born in 1894 in the remote (and well-known) town of Salant, in the Kovno district in the northwestern part of the Russian Empire. Born into an upper-middle-class family that combined traditional Torah learning with modern education, she was sent at a young age to acquire knowledge and schooling in a Jewish gymnasium far from home. There she studied for seven years, followed by an additional year of pedagogical training, and completed her studies with highest distinction, receiving a teaching certificate for work as a private tutor—reflecting the discriminatory practice common in Tsarist Russia toward Jews. After completing her studies, she joined the work at her mother’s pharmacy, while also volunteering as a private tutor for underprivileged girls.

During World War I, she and her family—like the other Jews of the Kovno district—were expelled by the Russian military authorities and suffered severe hunger in their refuge city, Vilna. A year later, the German occupation authorities permitted her family to return to Salant, where they began a slow process of rebuilding their business.

With the establishment of the Lithuanian Republic and the creation of Jewish autonomy, Chaja-henė Zyvaitė was appointed in 1919 as principal of the local school founded by the Hebrew Cultural Organization Tarbut. She remained in this position until the great fire of 1926, in which the school also burned down. During the long interim period until reconstruction, she began studying philosophy and pedagogy at the University of Kovno.

Chaja-henė Zyvaitė completed her academic studies in 1931, precisely when a Jewish girls’ orphanage was being established in Kovno. She was asked to serve as the pedagogical director of this new institution, whose pupils came from the most vulnerable layers of the Jewish population in Kovno and its surroundings.

In the late 1930s she began contemplating immigration to the Land of Israel and the establishment of an educational institution there, and she even purchased a substantial plot of land for this purpose. The Holocaust, however, cut short any possibility of fulfilling these aspirations and dreams.

The work “Beyond the End” seeks to illuminate the figure of this devout, proto-feminist woman—an erudite scholar with an independent, determined character—who, although she did not follow the conventional path nor fit into the accepted bourgeois social order of her time, carved her own unique and independent ways, pursuing her aspirations through constant inner inquiry and a parallel emotional personal journey.