Vilna

Today, Vilna is called Vilnius and is the capital of Lithuania.

The Jewish inhabitants called the city Wilne. Before the German invasion, a third of the city’s population was Jewish. Wilne was known as a remarkably diverse centre of religious, cultural and political Jewish life. It was also called “Jerusalem of Lithuania”.

Wilne does not exist anymore. This culture was destroyed within 2 years after the Germans invaded the city on June 22nd, 1941. Only around 2,000 of the 80,000 Jewish men and women who had lived in Vilna survived the Holocaust.