November 24, 1996 Piles of Storied Jewish Books Are Languishing in
Lithuania By MICHAEL SPECTER

Tens of thousands of rare Hebrew and Yiddish texts lie in dusty heaps in
a Roman Catholic church here, desiccated and forgotten. Many date from
the 17th and 18th centuries, when this city became an unrivaled center
of Jewish intellectual and spiritual innovation.

The books, forming what experts regard as one of the largest such
collections in the world, were hidden first from the Nazis and then
concealed for years from the Soviets under stacks of farm statistics. They
are the property of the Lithuanian National Library, whose director says
he considers them a ''treasure beyond value.''

But scholars have not been given regular access to the church and even
the two women struggling to catalogue the books say they have no idea
how many of them are left to examine.

''This is our legacy,'' said Larissa Lampert, who teaches Biblical
Hebrew and Rabbinic Literature at Vilnius University and who, along
with a Holocaust survivor, Fira Bramson, has been sorting the books in
an unheated and unlighted room. ''This is what remains of the culture
of the Jews of Lithuania. We must save it to remind people of what once
flourished here.''

But finding a way to do that -- and a place -- has proven nearly
impossible. Only about 4,000 Jews are left in Lithuania, mostly elderly,
and community leaders say these books are their last powerful link to
a heritage that the Nazis and then the Soviets tried hard to obliterate.

But Jewish scholars say the books, collected from the most important and
renowned yeshivas and libraries in Eastern Europe, no longer belong in
Lithuania. They consider their presence here -- where the Nazis killed
240,000 Jews and came closer than in any other country to their goal of
wiping them out -- to be useless and absurd.

''These books are priceless and they belong to the Jewish people,''
said Allan Nadler, director of research at Yivo, the institute devoted to
Jewish and Yiddish culture and scholarship that was based in Vilnius from
1925 and moved to New York after World War II. Mr. Nadler is one of the
few scholars to have spent more than an hour or so searching the stacks.

''There is nothing like this collection in the world,'' he said. ''And
they are of virtually no use to anyone living in Lithuania today. I
don't care if they come to New York or to Jerusalem or somewhere else
where the Jewish people can have access to them. But for them to sit in
a church in Lithuania is an outrage.''

But many of those Jews who remain in Vilnius say that to strip this land
of that legacy of intellect and discovery would be to defeat 600 years
of a culture in a place once so vital and central to Jewish thought that
it was called the Jerusalem of the North.

It is hard to exaggerate the importance of Vilna, as it is called
in Yiddish, to the development of Jewish culture over the last 300
years. At the turn of this century there were more than 100 synagogues
here, and nearly 40 percent of the population was Jewish.

Six daily Yiddish papers were published. The Bund, the Jewish labor guild,
was founded here and so was the Vilna Troupe, perhaps the Yiddish-speaking
world's greatest repertory theater. The Strashun Library, one of the
modern Jewish world's landmark centers of learning, was also in Vilnius.

Now, books written more than 200 years ago by Elijah ben Solomon Zalmen,
known as the Gaon of Vilna, sit next to aging radiators unrestored and
in bone-dry conditions. Elijah ben Solomon Zalmen, whose famous nickname
refers to the cobblestone street he lived on, is often regarded as the
most rigorous force behind the Jewish Enlightenment, urging Jews to
study grammar, astronomy and other disciplines as well as the Torah.

Damaged Hebrew translations of Aristotle from the 17th century are among
the books the librarians have discovered.

''We have no idea how much more of it is in there,'' Miss Lampert
said. ''It is impossible to get everything quickly with the resources
we have available.''

The library's director, Vladis Bulavas, refused to let a reporter into the
church because he said there was no ''scholarly purpose'' in seeking to
examine the books. But Miss Lampert said that among the books locked up
there were thousands of first editions published here by the Romm Press,
which by the 19th century had become the largest publishing house of
Hebrew and Yiddish texts in the world.

There are also what she described as ''masses'' of books taken from the
Yeshiva in the western Lithuanian town of Telshay, a place that scholars
rank among the most important of all Jewish educational institutions.

''Is there some simple way to resolve this?'' said Mikhail Jakobas,
director of one of the two Hebrew schools remaining in the nation. ''No,
of course not. But I came from Telshay. And I wonder now, did my
grandfather write in the margins of those books? Are they what turned
my father into a great and learned man?''

''I can't say that this will ever be a center of Jewish learning again,''
he said. ''I know that our renaissance here is in the past. But books
are our love and our obligation. And as much as I admit that more people
would use them someplace else, I cannot hope to see them leave. Too much
has left here already.''

Mr. Jakobas, who said he never encourages his bright young students to
stay in Lithuania if there is a decent chance to live elsewhere, would
like to see an international group of scholars meet and decide the fate
of the texts. Like many people here, what he would like most is to find
money for a library where the books would be treated properly and scholars
could use them in a dignified setting. The entire annual budget for the
National Library -- $100,000 -- is not enough to keep the lights on in
all the rooms through the winter.

The Jews of Vilnius today are struggling. Most are here because they are
old, or their parents are too sick to move. A greater percentage of Jews
left this country after the Soviet Union broke apart than left any of the
other republics, including Russia. There are groups, like the Lubavitcher,
trying to bring Jewish culture back. But it is not easy.

''I am a practical man,'' said Sholom Ber Krinsky, a Lubavitcher rabbi who
has lived in Vilnius for three years, and is working hard at rekindling
the community. ''The books are being treated shamefully and I don't
believe they will ever be used properly here. They need to be rescued
even if that means taken from us.''

The library's director began an interview by insisting that the books
could never leave the country. ''They are our national heritage,'' he
said. ''They belong to nobody else.'' He then said he would be happy to
''trade'' the books for equally valuable riches stolen by Germany or
Russia from Lithuania if such loot could be produced.

''Certainly,'' he said, ''it is worth exploring the question of what
could be offered to us.''

This type of talk has angered many of those who believe the books belong
in Lithuania. It has also infuriated people who say that the library has
no real interest in them. Most of the books were published in Poland,
the country Vilnius was in until it was transferred to Lithuania under
the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939. By the next summer the Soviet Union
had taken over the country.

''How you interpret property rights in this part of the world is extremely
difficult,'' said Michael Stanislawski, a professor who specializes
in Jewish history at Columbia University. ''I am not overly optimistic
about the prospects for Jewish life in Vilna today. Of course I would
prefer that these books be in New York or Jerusalem.''

''But we have to be careful here,'' he said. ''Jews are in an awkward
situation. We constantly protest that they write history in countries
like Lithuania that excludes the Jews. Yet we are always trying to take
Jewish material away from there.''

Like others who talked about the books, he said it was important to
separate the issues of how the materials were being treated with where
they ought to end up.

''It is a scandal that they are not open to people and that they lie
there uncared for,'' he said, noting that he had not seen the books or
tried to. ''But that does not necessarily mean they must be taken out
of the country.''

There are now many ways of copying books -- even manuscripts -- and
sending those copies abroad or even posting them on the Internet. The
Library of Congress, at the strong recommendation of Yivo, sent
microfilming equipment to Vilnius two years ago so librarians here could
copy 75,000 Yiddish and Hebrew periodicals found in the church. But that
project does not include the books.

''Unfortunately these books and the Jews here are one,'' said Mr. Jakobas,
director of the Hebrew school. ''Maybe the best thing in the world is
for the books to go and for the Jews to go. But if the books go we should
not be naive. It means the Jews are gone too.''