Chaja-henė Zyvaitė — Association of Jews of Vilna and vicinity in Israel

Chaja-henė Zyvaitė was born in 1894 in the remote (and well-known) town of Salant, in the Kovno district in the northwest 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—consistent with the discriminatory practices common in Tsarist Russia toward Jews. Upon finishing her studies, she took part in running the pharmacy owned by her mother, while also volunteering as a private tutor for girls in need.

During World War I, she and her family—like the rest of the 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 allowed 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 was also destroyed. 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, just as 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 Jewish society in Kovno and its surroundings.

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

Chaja-henė Zyvaitė was a devout, proto-feminist woman—an erudite scholar with a strong, independent spirit—who, though she did not follow the accepted path nor conform to the bourgeois social norms of her era, carved out her own distinctive and independent ways, fulfilling her aspirations through constant inner inquiry and an emotionally resonant personal journey.

Chaya ended her life walking together with her pupils toward the killing pit in October 1941.