Location of Svencionys

     - Eastern Lithuania, in the Svencioniu Rajonas
(literally, "Rural District"--an Administrative Region),
bordering Belarus

      - 55 09'/26 10'

         Svencionys is located on the banks of the Kuna Stream 46.6 miles NE of Vilnius, the capital of the Republic of Lithuania (Lietuvos Respublika).  It sits at an altitude of 593 feet in a region with many forests and almost 300 lakes.  Written sources from the 15th century date the founding of the town to the 13th century.  The name appears to derive from the Lithuanian ventas, meaning holy, blessed, sacred, sainted, hallowed, or perhaps also from the Lithuanian vente, meaning holiday, gala, feast, festival. The modern name of the town of Svencionys is pronounced as if its English spelling were "Shven-TSHYO-nis," with the accent falling on the next-to-last syllable.  

         Map Showing Roads and Railroads (Svencionys is 6.7 miles east of Svencioneliai, shown on this map; click on map to enlarge.)

         The history of Svintsyan is linked to the tangled history of Lithuania, which has sometimes been an independent nation and sometimes not and was broken up between the two World Wars, with regions containing Svintsyan moving between several different countries.

Political History of Lithuania and Svintsyan with Regard to Location

Pre-19th Century

         The Jewish presence in Lithuania dates back to the early part of the 14th century.  Lithuania was an important center for artisans and craftsmen in the Middle Ages, and the Jews took part also in these occupations.  By the 17th century, Lithuanian yeshivot had become famous all over the world.  Many Lithuanian Jews worked as craftsmen or leased businesses, sometimes also administering estates belonging to others.  And they were moneylenders and tax collectors.  Though Jews in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth were limited as to what they could own, they were given legal equality with non-Jews.  Perhaps for this reason, the number of Jewish inhabitants of Lithuania increased steadily during the 16th through the 18th centuries.

         History of the Jews in Lithuania

         The period preceding the 19th century gave birth to several important Jewish religious movements that were to have varying degrees of influence in Lithuania and in Svintsyan.  These were Shabbeteanism, Frankism, Hasidism, the Haskalah, and the Orthodoxy advocated by the Vilna Gaon.

Pre-19th-Century Jewish Religious Movements

19th Century

Lithuanian Jews under Russia

          The partitions of Poland ending in 1795 had made Lithuania part of the Russian Empire.  For most of the next 200 years, Lithuania remained under Russian domination.  Catherine the Great, ruler of Russia at the time of the partitions, had established a pale that restricted Jews, with few exceptions, to certain prescribed areas within the Russian Empire, prohibiting them from settling elsewhere.  Various legal restrictions continued to apply to Jews in the Pale of Settlement.
 

    Napoleon and Svintsyan

          The invasion of Russia by Napoleon in the early part of the 19th century was an event that could have changed the status of the Jews.  Napoleon had shown himself to be a great friend of the Jews in Italy, where he had abolished the ghettos.  He had promoted the idea of a Jewish homeland in Palestine and had given the Jews civil liberties and religious equality in France.

          Napoleon and the Jews

          But he was, of course, coming to Russia as a conqueror.  Russian Jews were suspicious of Napoleon's reforms; and the Hasidic rabbis were afraid that, in turning toward Napoleon, the Jews might turn away from God.   In Lithuanian territory in the summer of 1812, Napoleon had not reckoned on the heat and rain that transformed  the roads into mud, impeding the progress of supply wagons.  His inadequately provisioned soldiers rioted and looted in Vilna--a fact that undoubtedly also prejudiced the local population against him.  Proceeding to Svintsyan, Napoleon stopped there for one night at the largest house in town and, in the morning, reviewed his guard and troops from the balcony.  This house, known afterwards as "Napoleon's House,"  would eventually belong to a Jewish woman, Margolia Pliner, who, prior to the Holocaust, ran it as a mini-hotel with a first-floor refreshment bar and bakery.

    The Jews and the Russian Army

          Various forms of repression for the Jews had begun in Russia before Napoleon and continued after his campaign there failed.  Many of these had conversion of the Jews to Christianity as their aim.  A particularly heinous 1827 statute of Tsar Nicolas I required a quota of army conscripts from each Jewish community.  Unlike other Russians, who were required to serve in the army for 25 years, Jewish boys had six years added to their term of service prior to age 18, which meant that 12-year-olds and sometimes boys even younger were often forcibly removed from their families and obliged to serve in the military

          Jews in the 19th-century Russian Army

    Jewish Religious Movements

          In the 19th century, the Haskalah, or Jewish "Enlightenment," which had long been active elsewhere, finally reached Lithuania and began to gain many adherents there.  Another religious movement, the Musar (or "Mussar") Movement, with some elements of both the Haskalah and Hasidism, also attained prominence at this time but eventually died out in Lithuania.

19th-Century Jewish Religious Movements

    Assassination and Its Aftermath

          On March 1, 1881, Tsar Alexander II, a popular monarch who had freed the serfs, was assassinated.  Although of the six conspirators subsequently rounded up, only one was Jewish (a young woman named Gessia Gelfman), pogroms broke out in many southwestern areas of the Pale of Settlement, prompting a wave of Jewish emigration that would eventually spread to other parts of the Pale and continue for many years.  The Jews of Lithuania were initially spared because the Governor of Vilna Province prohibited pogroms. But fires set by arsonists ravaged many Jewish neighborhoods throughout Lithuania.
          Although the next Tsar, Alexander III, promulgated some reforms favorable to the Jews, this attitude was short lived.  In 1804, Jews had been ousted from villages and ordered to settle in rural areas--a plan which soon, however, proved largely unworkable.  The 1882 "May Laws" reduced the area of the Pale and confined Jews to towns, prohibiting them from settling in rural areas.  Jews could not own land or property except for the houses they already lived in, and they were barred from many professions.  The numerus clausus of 1887 established quotas of only 10% for Jewish students in Russian schools and institutions of higher learning within the Pale of Settlement, and there were even more restrictive quotas for Jews living in Moscow and St. Petersburg.
          The expulsion of the Jews from Moscow in 1891 brought refugees pouring into the northwestern part of the Pale and gave impetus to a subsequent flood of Jewish emigration from Lithuania.  The emigrees from Lithuania went primarily to America; and they went, in somewhat smaller numbers, to South Africa.
 

Zionism and the Jews of Svintsyan

         Interest in establishing Jewish settlements in Palestine was also sparked.  In 1897, Theodor Herzl  convened the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, writing in a prophetic September 3, 1897 diary entry, "In Basel, I founded the Jewish State."

         Theodor Herzl

          Some of Svintsyan's Jews raised funds or traveled to the Holy Land with the Vilna "Lovers of Zion" to purchase tracts and plant vineyards.  A few "Svintsyaners" went to Palestine to live in the latter part of the 19th century; more would immigrate and settle there in the 20th.  These aliyahs would save many Lithuanian Jews, including the immigrants from Svintsyan, from annihilation in the Holocaust.
 

Religion in Svintsyan

          Though followers of the false messiah, Shabbetai Zvi, could still be found in Lithuania for many years, in shtetls like Svintsyan one of the most insulting things one could accuse a fellow Jew of was Shabbeteanism.
          By the 19th century, much of Jewish life in Svintsyan (as in other Lithuanian towns) revolved around the shtetl's Orthodox synagogues.  One such synagogue, now referred to by survivors as the "Old Synagogue," was a substantial brick structure that could house a large congregation.  It eventually became home also to a family of storks, who built a nest on its roof and returned there every year.

          Photo of Svintsyan's "Old Synagogue"

          In addition to the "Old Synagogue," for adherents of the Orthodoxy propounded by the Vilna Gaon (mitnagdim), Svintsyan had two Hasidic congregations and a synagogue for craftsmen and artisans.  It would eventually have a fifth synagogue, referred to as the "New Synagogue"--also for mitnagdim.
          The 19th century saw the establishment of some of Lithuania's most famous yeshivot, those of Volozhin, Slobodka, Mir, Radin, and Telz.   The yeshivot at Lida and Ponevez would be established early in the 20th century.

          Lithuanian Yeshivot

          Svintsyan had a yeshiva for awhile, too, under Rabbi Isaac Jacob Reines.

    Rabbi Isaac Jacob Reines

          Isaac Jacob Reines (1839-1915), who became Svintsyan's religious leader in 1869, was an important proponent of the Haskalah in Svintsyan.  Reines established a yeshiva there in which non-religious subjects as well as religious ones were taught and physical labor was encouraged.  His devotion to the study of Russian secular subjects brought him into conflict with Svintsyan's ultra-Orthodox population, particularly the Hasidim, and Reines was obliged to close his school and leave for Lida in 1888.  Reines eventually became a staunch admirer of Theodore Herzl, joining the Zionist movement in 1898, and publishing the book Or Hadash Al Tzion (A New Light on Zion) in 1902.  Although at the 6th Zionist Congress in 1903 the practical Reines supported the British proposal for a Jewish homeland in Uganda, Reines is best known today as the founder of the Mizrachi movement, which envisioned the return to Palestine and establishment of a Jewish homeland there as the solution to the problem of Jewish persecution.

          Rabbi Isaac Jacob Reines

    Mordecai Menahem Kaplan

          One of the most famous "sons of Svintsyan" was Mordecai Menahem Kaplan (1881-1983), born in Svintsyan to Israel Kaplan and Anna Kowarsky, a member of a large family prominent in Svintsyan for many years.  (One of Anna's brother was Jonas Kowarsky, born 1866, died 1933.) At the age of 9, Mordecai Kaplan immigrated to America with his parents.  In spite of the Orthodoxy of his mother and father, Kaplan was attracted to heterodox philosophies.  Eventually he attended Jewish Theological Seminary, becoming an ordained rabbi in 1902.  Kaplan rejected a literal interpretation of the Bible, called for a concept of Judaism as a religious civilization, founded the Society for the Advancement of Judaism, and established the Reconstructionist Movement in Judaism.  Kaplan's liberal leanings brought him into conflict with the Union of Orthodox Rabbis of the United States and Canada.  In fact, his unorthodox ideas were rejected by most of the Conservative faculty at Jewish Theological Seminary.  Nonetheless, he taught there for 50 years.  By the time of his death in New York on November 8, 1983, Kaplan was revered as one of American Judaism's most influential thinkers.

          The biblical prohibition against the making of images kept Jews out of art for many years.  There were Jewish artisans but not Jewish artists.  But 19th-century liberalizing trends in Lithuanian Judaism eventually led to the appearance of Lithuanian Jewish artists.  Some of the most famous were landscape painter Isaac Levitan (born in Kibartay, 1860), William Zorach (born in Jurbarkas, 1887), Jacques Lipchitz (born in Drushkininkai, 1891), Chaim Soutine (born in Smilavitchy, 1894), and Ben Shahn (born in Kovno, 1898).    

          Svintsyan also had someone who became a famous American Jewish artist:  Meyer Matzkin, born in Svintsyan in 1881.  Matzkin was a self-taught painter, primarily of portraits and landscapes.  In 1904, he immigated to America, settling in the Boston area.  His  works were displayed at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Chicago Art Institute, and Philadelphia's Pennsylvania Academy of Art.
          The Smithsonian (Archives of American Art) has conducted an oral history interview with Matzkin, and microfilm showing some of his paintings is also available from the Archives of American Art.
 

20th Century

World War I, the Russian Revolution, and Jewish Socialism

          When Russia was attacked by Germany in 1914, Russian Jews sprang to the defense of their country.  But the long-standing Russian anti-semitism was not to be dispelled so easily.  Jews in Lithuanian areas of Russia were accused of being German spies.   They were even expelled from part of the Kovno Gubernia.
          In some parts of the Russian Empire, invading German forces treated Jews well--a fact which was to lull Jews into a false anticipation of German intentions later during World War II.  But Jews were sometimes also subjected to maltreatment by the Germans during World War I.  Many Jews from Vilna and nearby villages were incarcerated by the Germans at Poligon (literally, "shooting range"),  the site of a former Polish Army camp near Novo (New) Svintsyan less than seven miles distant from Svintsyan.  During this period, the Jews of Svintsyan and Novo Svintsyan, who had been more fortunate than their Vilna counterparts, organized relief efforts at Poligon.
          Meanwhile, in Russia, the winds of Revolution were blowing.  Food shortages during the winter of 1916-1917 caused rioting in Petrograd, and Tsar Nicholas II was forced to abdicate.  A struggle for control of Russia ensued between two kinds of Socialists--the radical Bolsheviks and the more moderate Mensheviks.

   Eva Broido, a Menshevik from Svintsyan

          Eva Gordon Broido (1876-1941) was the daughter of a Svintsyan timber merchant.   Nearby forests had made the timber industry an important one in Svintsyan, and the 1895 establishment of a rail line along the Postava-Svintsyan-Novo-Svintsyan route, and later to the town now known as Panevezys, had given the industry a boost by enabling easier transportation of wood as well as of other freight and also passengers.
          Eva Gordon grew up to be a strong-willed woman who trained as a pharmacist but became a revolutionary.  Her second husband was Mark Broido, also a revolutionary and childhood friend whose family had lived in Svintsyan before moving to Vilna.  Arrested in St. Petersburg as revolutionaries, Eva and Mark were married in jail and exiled to Siberia but escaped following a mutiny.  In 1914, Eva was again arrested and exiled to Siberia, this time without Mark.  But when revolution broke out in Russia in 1917, Eva became Secretary of the Central Committee of the Menshevik Party, while Mark was given an important position in the Petrograd (former name, St. Petersburg) Soviet.
          In late 1918, with the Provisional Government fallen, the White Army under General Yudenich challenging the Reds, and Russia in the throes of civil war, Eva and her youngest daughter, Vera, began an odyssey that led them from Moscow to Poland to Vienna, where they rejoined Mark, eventually making their way to Berlin.  Only later did they find out about events in Svintsyan during the Civil War in Russia.

The Combattants and the Jews of Svenciany

Sojourns in Svenciany and Surrounds

          Though the aliyahs that began in the 19th century and continued in the 20th would save many Lithuanian Jews (including immigrants from Svintsyan) from annihilation in the Holocaust, another movement that arose at the same time as Zionism would keep many Jews at home in Lithuania, leaving them in harm's way later.
          Only a few weeks after the convening of the first Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897, the General Jewish Labor Federation of Russia and Poland, an organization which came to be known as the Bund, was founded in Vilna.  One of its founders, its most active organizer, and its primary proponent in Svintsyan was Arkady (Aron) Kramer (sometimes also spelled "Kremer"), born in Svintsyan in 1865.  With Menshevik leader Yuli Martov, Kramer wrote an important Socialist pamphlet, On Agitation. The pamphlet advocated the emancipation of the working masses through their own efforts but called on the Social Democrats to lead the workers.
          In contrast to Zionists, who emphasized the importance of a Jewish Homeland, the Bundists were fierce proponents of staying put.  They envisioned a peaceful coexistence with their non-Jewish neighbors, one in which antisemitism would disappear and the Jews could flourish in a non-religious but distinctly Jewish cultural environment.  Bundists helped establish the great literary tradition in Yiddish and were instrumental in organizing Jewish resistence against pogroms.  But by their fierce opposition to Zionism and to Jewish emigration in general, they helped encourage the Jews to stay in Eastern Europe on the very eve of the Holocaust.

          The Bund, a Yiddish Socialist Labor Movement

          Vilna Bund Manifesto Against Zionism

          Bagnowka Video of People from Svintsyan   

    Before Germany invaded Poland and the Holocaust began, Ze'ev Jabotinsky issued the following warning:

It is already THREE years that I am calling upon you, Polish Jewry, who are the crown of World Jewry. I continue to warn you incessantly that a catastrophe is coming closer. I became grey and old in these years, my heart bleeds, that you, dear brother and sisters, do not see the volcano which will soon begin to spit its all-consuming lava. I see that you are not seeing this because you are immersed and sunk in your daily worries. Today, however, I demand from you trust. You were convinced already that my prognoses have already proven to be right. If you think differently, then drive me out of your midst! However, if you do believe me, then listen to me in this twelfth hour: In the name of G-d! Let anyone of you save himself, as long as there is still time, and time there is very little.

What else I would like to say to you on this day of Tisha B'Av is whoever of you will escape from the catastrophe, he or she will live to see the exalted moment of a great Jewish wedding - the rebirth and rise of a Jewish state. I don't know if I will be privileged to see it, but my son will! I believe in this, as I am sure that tomorrow morning the sun will rise.

Ze'ev Vladimir Jabotinsky
Tisha B'av 1938
Warsaw, Poland

        In 1939, following the German invasion of Poland, Polish refugees, including Jews, began to pour into Lithuania.  Svintsyan was in Poland at this time:

        Polish-Jewish Genealogy Questions and Answers

However, Lithuania had declared independence in 1918 following World War I.  Below is a little-known story of how the Lithuanian government helped many Polish refugees until this Lithuanian government fell in 1923.

        "The Silent Helpers," by Ginutis Procuta  

        In 1940 the Soviets established army bases in Lithuania and annexed the entire country, including the Vilna region, as the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic.  A strong Lithuanian nationalist movement sprang up in reaction to this, causing the Soviets to exile thousands of Lithuanian citizens considered politically unreliable in June of 1941, including Jews from Svintsyan.

         Soviet Deportations from Lithuania

         Only a week later, in violation of his pact with Stalin, Hitler invaded Lithuania and the Soviet Union.  The German invasion of Lithuania fed the hopes of Lithuanian nationalists and their aspirations for a lasting independence from the Soviet Union.  Jews, 4000 of them as volunteers, had helped defend Lithuania in its bid for independence from 1918 to 1923.  Yad Vashem has a photo of some of them:

         Jews Who Fought for Lithuanian Independence Gather in Utena, Lithuania

          Pogroms had begun even before the German invasion, and many young Lithuanian Jews--including some from Svintsyan--joined the Soviet Army or Jewish partisan units.  Some Jews from Svintsyan were deported; some fled to the Soviet Union before the German advance.  But many more Lithuanian Jews, including most of the Jews of Svintsyan, remained in their homes.  There they became fair game for the Nazis, aided by Lithuanian police, or Schutzmannschaft ("protective force") battalions.
          Almost immediately after the German invasion, severe repressions against Jews began.  The order for Lithuanian Jews to move into ghettos came on August 4, 1941, on the pretext that this would protect the Jews from excesses by the Lithuanian non-Jewish population.  Although some Lithuanian Jews were sent to Nazi labor camps, most were soon imprisoned within the newly established ghettos.  Svintsyan was the site of one of four Lithuanian ghettos.   Throughout Lithuania, mass executions of Jewish populations were soon initiated, with only Jews in "strategic occupations" initially  exempted.  The executions were carried out by Einsatzgruppen, so-called SS "action groups" that had begun as intelligence units tasked with "combatting hostile elements" but soon became mobile killing squads directed primarily against Poles and Jews.

          The Einsatzgruppen   

          The Jager Report
         
          A Guest at the Shooters' Banquet

          Only a few hundred Jews, the workers who could aid the German War effort through forced labor, had been allowed to remain in the Ghetto.  In Every Day Remembrance Day, Simon Wiesenthal writes that several hundred more Jews were murdered by the SS near Svieciany (Svintsyan) on January 7, 1942.  Some of those remaining sought, by any means, to save their loved ones.  One of the most amazing such stories is that told by Father Romuald Jakub Weksler-Waszkinel, who now lives in Israel and has found many family members there.

The Confession of a Polish Priest

          Gens Reports to the Jewish Leadership in Vilna on the Aktion in Ozmiana, October 1942

          From the Diary of Zelig Kalmonovitch Following the Report by Gens   

 Svintsyan Area Forests

 Svintsyan Partisans

          Thus, the only Jews from Svintsyan still alive after the Holocaust were those who had been able to wait out the war in exile in the Soviet Union, had survived through service in the Soviet Army or partisan units or in Nazi labor camps, or had managed to survive by hiding in forests or with Righteous Gentiles.

           In "The Birthday Party," published in the January 2000 issue of Commentary, Avner Holtzman recounts the fate of some of the Jews from Svintsyan.  The story he tells is an elegy for all who perished.

  "The Birthday Party"