Kaunas Choral Synagogue and Jewish Kaunas
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Transcript
Before the Second World War, Kaunas had a large and culturally diverse Jewish population. Jews were prominent in commerce, education, medicine, politics and religious life.
The Choral Synagogue, built in the nineteenth century, is one of the surviving institutions of that community.
Independent Lithuania offered new civic possibilities while also containing periods of antisemitism and social tension. That complexity matters because the Holocaust did not strike an abstract population. It destroyed a deeply rooted local society.
After Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, violence against Kaunas Jews began almost immediately. German occupation authorities and local collaborators confined Jews in the Kovno Ghetto and organised mass murder.
The synagogue survives. Most of the community that used Jewish Kaunas’s many institutions did not.
Do not use survival of one building as a comforting statistic.