Vorne, Lithuania Contributions from Vorne Descendants

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Steven Morris, whose family came from Vorne, visited the town in 2017 during a business trip to Lithuania. He contacted a well-known guide in Kaunas called Chaim Bargman (incidentally the same guide who accompanied Dan Jacobson in his book Heshel's Kingdom) and sent this report:

We met up with Chaim Bargman in Kaunas on a Sunday morning and drove straight to Varniai/Vorne. He is very knowledgeable and affable. In Varniai we went directly to the Jewish cemetery which is actually signposted in the town, fine if you can read and understand Lithuanian.
It is on "Kalno g" two-thirds of the way between the first fork on the right and the right-hand bend beyond, on the left-hand side in a copse of trees about 100yds from the road. The cemetery is fenced round and reasonably well maintained.
Chaim has a technique of rubbing the stone face with chalk to give the lettering more contrast, as you can imagine this is quite time-consuming.
We started with some of the oldest stones but I found no confirmatory information about my family and, up to the late 1800s, surnames were generally not appended. We finally got to the late 1890s and, miracle of miracles, the last stone on the last row of the modern era belonged to my maternal great grandmother with, very unusually, the surname inscribed.  It's hard for me to describe my emotions, to find the stone at all seemed almost miraculous. I was quite overwhelmed.

The Varniai webpage was created and compiled by Susan Gerichter until 2015. Compiled by Paul Seftel (paul.j.seftel@gmail.com) from 2015 Copyright © 2009 Susan Gerichter Copyright © 2015 Paul Seftel Updated: February 2021

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