Jewish Šiauliai

Just exactly when the first Jews settled in Šiauliai (or Shavl as it’s known in the Jewish world) is uncertain. What is known relates to a likely apocryphal story dated around the latter half of the 17th century when the city was still a small village. One day, the village’s Christians were bringing a large new bell for their church when they somehow managed to drop it in a river and couldn’t get it out again. A Jewish gentleman by the name of Reb Zev Nurok Katz risked his life and successfully retrieved the bell, for which in return he received rights for himself and his family to reside in Šiauliai. The first known synagogue was built from wood in 1749, around the same time as the founding of the Jewish Cemetery, now a forlorn, raped and abandoned place between Šilo and Rėkyvos. Šiauliai was notable in Lithuania for being one of the few towns where Jews prospered beyond their usual stations in local life as traders, shopkeepers and artisans. Among those Jews who excelled in public life was the Ukmergė-born industrialist and philanthropist Chaim Frenkel (1857-1920), the owner of the largest leather-processing factory in the Russian Empire, which still stands next to the villa he built in 1908 (see Museums). On June 26, 1941 the German army entered Šiauliai and began murdering the Jewish population almost immediately. Two ghettos were set up, of which a memorial stone stands at the junction of Ežero and Trakų. By the time the Red Army marched into the city on July 27, 1944, of its Jewish population of 8,000 in 1939 just 500 Jews remained. Šiauliai no longer has an active Jewish community, and there’s little left to see. As well as the places mentioned above, the two other most notable Jewish sites are the old synagogue at Vilniaus 68, now a small chapel used by an obscure Christian sect and the rather tasteless low walls on either side of Aušros Takas, the small path that leads from the Cathedral to the Sundial. The stones used for their construction, which bear no memorial stone, were pilfered from the walls that once surrounded the Jewish Cemetery, which was closed in 1965.