Kaunas : Day Two Thursday July 29th 2004

I woke up earlier than the rest of the gang and headed over the Lubavitchers for Shacharis services. At 8:30, it was a beginners' minyan. Most of the congregants, numebring around 30, were in their 20s & 30s, and married. Rabbi Krinsky would give a short commentary frm time to time, and the major prayers such as Ashrei and Shema were sung to different melodies. All in all it took over 75 minutes to complete. Thursday's Torah portion was Ve'Etchanan, and I was given the first aliyeh. It was a rush thinking I was the first Prensky in over 60 years to get called up to the Torah in a land where probably 3 - 4 generations of my ancestors had walked.

The style of the prayers, Nusach Ari, was slightly different than my own Ashkenaz tradition. There was one interesting twist which I was not prepared for. During the prayer Aleinu, during a sentance referring to the vanity of worshipping idols that neither speak nor hear, at exactly the same time about three quarters of the congregation spat onto the flour and rubbed out their own spittle with their foot! Not something you hear everyday; the sounds of 20+ grown men spitting. I was told the custom used to be more widespread before the war and people's tastes changed, but it looks like here in Vilnius the spitting is going strong!

Breakfast was at the Lubavitch as well, and Daniel was once again in great form. My Mother-In-Law was enormously helpful in getting Daniel fed. He was all over the sugary pastries and cucumbers, and kept pointing to various drinks and dishes on the table that he wanted to taste. It didn't matter that my glass of Sprite was the same as Eileen's, mor my Dad's, he kept wanting bits from all of our meals, and who is to argue with the boss?

After breakfast, the plan was to drive to Kaunas and spend the day there. We encountered a serious problem right off the bat: the car wouldn't start. My father tried numberous times, then called the car rental company. The firm we rented the vehicle from is a very small business with sporatic operating hours. We were glad to just get them on the phone. They said they would send someone over to our location within 30 minutes.

Instead the company called us back at the Lubavitch office numerous times to ask us to try differnt strategems to start the car. None worked. Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, Gail stepped into the car and got it to work! Her secret - the car had a wireless disabling button on the key fob, to prevent theft. Neither Dad or I could figure it out! Gail was the hero of the day as we left Vilnius around 11am, but happy to be on the road.

We arrived at Kaunas around 1:30, after a few stops along the way. Daniel was especially playful at a gas stop right outside Kaunus, playing on some Communist-era swings and such (with grandpa Prensky's help of course).
Navigating ourselves into Kaunus from Hwy 1 took a little doing, but we were able to get to the center of town and find a parking stop rather easily. As we approached 'Laisves Aleja' (Freedom Way), previously the main drag, now a mile-long pedestrian mall, a pedestrian mall where my father's family lived in the 30s, I could see my Dad lightening up and feeling at home with navigating the streets, boulevards & shops.

Daniel was agreeable, and Eillen, Gail, and I followed Dad to his childhood home, Laisves Aleja 50. Behind the building facade led into a large courtyard where a number of buildings once stood. Like many houses, the facade had a horse-cart wide entrance into the yard containing various smaller apartment houses, service buildings,and businesses, that formed an isolated world withinthe city. You could still see the outline of some of the long since torn down buildings outlined against the brick of two older but sturdier buildings still standing. Off to the right was a fairly large brick building that my father said abutted against the window of his bedroom. Built around 1939, it obstructed his family's view from their apartment and my father remembered vividly how he would push away the fresh bricks whenever the workers weren't around.

The neighborhood that my father lived in was back then, and still is, a relatively well-off one. The urban design, where a number of small apartment buildings surrounded a courtyard leading onto a prominent shopping strip, is unfamiliar to me coming from modern day America. In Manhattan, the courtyard would've been long gone, replaced with one big skyscraper. It tried closing my eyes and imagining what it must've looked like.

We all did some shopping on the mall while Dad struck out to reconnoiter on his own. He found the building that was his Hebrew Gymnasium, a secular school, untouched, now a Music School. We later drove up to it, and also stopped at the last remaining synagogue in Kaunas, beautifully restored inside, but with hardly any congregants. We then drove across the river to where the ghetto once stood. After the war, the Russians overbuilt the area, all that remained are some of the older street names, some now turned into boulevards and drab, 5- and 10- story drab communist-era apartment building complexes. The main roads bordering the ghetto were still in existance, and my father pointed out where the ghetto's borders were. It was hard to imagine squeezing in 20,000 people in a space no more than a few acres.

The last trip we took in Kaunus was up north to Fort IX, the sight of the mass murder of almost of the ghetto's inhabitants. My father came mainly to see where his 20-year old sister was executed together with her boy friend, his family, and and about 9,000 otherstaken from the ghetto on October 29, 1941.

To their credit, the pre-independance Lithuania decided against building over the mass graves and instead designed a park and memorial to the 'victims of fascism'. The post independance government left the communist-era plaques in place, but added new once to emphasize the extant of Jewish suffering that took place at the site. Of the roughly 50,000 people who were killed at the site over 3+ years, 30,000 came from the Kovno ghetto, 10-15 thousand were Jews shipped in from other countries, 1,000 were local Russian communists captured by German forces, and the remainer were non-Jewish enemy combatants and assorted political prisoners.

We made it back to Vilnius in time for a 9pm dinner at Lubavitch, then headed off to the hotel. It doesn't get dark till about 10:15, and even then it's not entirely pitch black until midnight. Speaking for myself, I couldn't get to sleep until 1-2 in the morning.