On August 25, my three daughters and I found ourselves on a bus together with descendants of my grandfather's neighbors, whom I had never met. We were all on our way to Shaduva, Lithuania, returning to the shtetl our relatives had come from, on a date exactly 84 years after the town's last Jews were shot, to mark the opening of the Lost Shtetl Museum.
Shaduva (Seduva) is a quiet, small town (shtetl in Yiddish) in the north of Lithuania that hardly anyone has ever heard of. Before the first World War, about 4,000 Jews lived there; today there are none in a population of only about 2,000.
Yet today, Shaduva is home to a remarkable, world-class museum – the Lost Shtetl Museum – that I recently visited with my three daughters on a Roots trip on the occasion of its opening. We expected to find a modest record of the Jews of Shaduva, who included my grandparents and father Abram Novis. Instead we were astonished by the scale of the museum.
With a floor space of 27,000 square meters, the museum's building was designed by the distinguished Finnish architect Rainer Mahlamäki while the interior was designed by Ralph Appelbaum Associates, whose other projects include no less than the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
How did this happen? How did such a massive project find a home in Shaduva, of all places?
Some years ago, a small group of former Lithuanian descendants established a non-profit organization documenting Jewish cemeteries in Lithuania. They undertook to restore the Jewish cemetery in Shaduva and create monuments at the three main killing sites in the nearby forests.
The Lost Shtetl Museum idea came to fruition as the project of a descendent of Shaduva Jews, who had lived in South Africa, was familiar with the organization, and had dreamed of establishing a museum in the town where his father had come from. He decided to finance the project.
The history of the Jews in Shaduva is not unlike those of Jews elsewhere in the area. Jews had lived in the town for over 300 years. They were engaged in every sector of the town's existence and established religious and secular schools as well as two synagogues and many little shtibelach.
When Lithuania was taken over by the Russians in the 17th century, life became difficult. Poverty was widespread and the requirement to serve in the Russian army for many years was a greatly feared aspect of life. Although pogroms did not occur as they did in the Ukraine, many Jews left in the 1880s up to 1914 and again in the 1920s and 30s, in search of opportunity abroad. Approximately 30% of those leaving Lithuania went to South Africa and about 40-50% to North America. Smaller numbers went to Great Britain and Latin America and others (10%) went to Palestine (Israel).
Sadly, about 90% of the Jewish community of 250,000 who remained in Lithuania was murdered by the Nazis and their Lithuanian collaborators. Only about 12,000 survived, living mainly in eastern Russia. Following emigration after the war years and with the fall of the Soviet Union, only about 1,200 Jews remain in the whole of Lithuania today.
Only three Jewish families from Shaduva escaped death. In September 1941, eleven Jews were baptized, hoping to escape death. Unfortunately, only one woman, Sadaminta Nol and her unborn son survived the war. He is in his 80s today, lives in Kfar Saba and was present at the opening of the museum.
My father was born in Shaduva. His father and his three older brothers left for Pretoria, South Africa and 1904, and he followed with his mother and youngest brother in 1907. When I learned that the official opening of the Lost Shtetl Museum was due to take place in August 2025, I thought this would be a great opportunity to take a Roots trip with my three daughters, Nurit, Daniella and Tamara. My wife Carol had already visited Lithuania on a previous trip we had taken in 1995.
On arrival in Vilna (today Vilnius), we walked around the old historic center. Vilna, the political and cultural center of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania from the 13th to the 18th centuries, is an outstanding example of a city where Eastern and Western cultures meet. It was the center of Jewish culture in Lithuania (called "the Jerusalem of Lita") the historic center dates back five centuries and has been largely restored to its former glory by the UNESCO World Heritage Fund.
Today, the old Jewish ghetto no longer has a Jewish community. The only building still in use is the Old Choral Synagogue, where we attended services on Shabbat. The rest of the ghetto is now a beautiful tourist area with hotels, cafes, restaurants and boutiques.
The next morning, we took a walking tour of the old Jewish quarter, visiting the site of the old destroyed Great Synagogue and the Vilna Gaon's monument, the Museum of Culture and Identity of Lithuanian Jews, where Jews hid during the time of the German occupation. The Jewish State Museum is a wonderful museum, exploring the history of Litvak Jewry and mentioning some of the famous people who came from there.
A walking tour of general Vilnius took us to the strange area of Uzupis which declared itself a sovereign area in an April Fool's joke and became an artistic-hipster area. There are numerous buildings of interest in Vilnius including many beautiful churches and cathedrals. As we were walking by the impressive sites of contemporary Vilnius, we marveled at the change that the city had undergone in the 35 years since it had gained its independence from the Soviet Union.
However, another concern loomed large for us as we walked the streets of what used to be a huge Ghetto: How do the Lithuanians of today reckon with their dark history vis-à-vis the Jews? The sad and almost ungraspable fact is that Lithuanian Jews were subject to a particularly gruesome Holocaust known as "Death by bullets," which means that they were taken en masse to pre-prepared graves and shot, often by their own Lithuanian neighbors.
Although we did not visit it on this trip, the site of the mass killings of the Jews in Panerai Forest is a silent testimony to one of these events.
We then took a full day trip to Kovno (now Kaunas). On the way, we stopped at the shtetl of Ziezmarai, to see a renovated wooden shul.
In Kovno, our first stop was at the incredibly interesting Museum of Sugihara. Sugihara, the Japanese consul in Kovno, took upon himself to save as many Jews as he could by offering them visas to Japan on their way to the East and to Curacao. The house shows an installation where he issued visas and one can obtain a visa replica, using one's own photograph. There are pictures of the Sugihara family as well as refugee photos including some Lithuanian rescuers. One can explore a list of 2,139 issued visas and see photos of the descendants of refugees.
We proceeded on to the only remaining synagogue in Kovno. The "shames" (shul keeper) came to open it, especially for us, but I was only able to communicate with him in my very limited Yiddish. Only 60 Jews remain in Kovno today. We then visited the old cemetery in Kovno as well as the old Kovno ghetto. At the end of the trip, we went to the Ninth Fort museum with its historical artifacts and the site of the mass slaughter of the Jews on the hill next to the fort.
Our final day in Lithuania was spent at the opening of the Lost Shtetl Museum in Shaduva. The organizers had provided buses for the two-hour trip from Vilna, during which our guide gave a comprehensive history of Jewish Lithuania.
In Shaduva, we drove through the former shtetl and visited the old Gymnasium High School which had been completely revamped and refurnished with the most modern equipment, funded by the donor of the Museum.
In the afternoon, we visited the Museum of the Lost Shtetl. The exhibitions were developed by a Lithuanian curatorial team in collaboration with Jewish culture and history experts from all over the world. It is based on authentic testimonies and artifacts shared by descendants of Shaduva Jews now scattered across the world.
The museum building is a conceptual interpretation of a lost shtetl consisting of one large structure, the exterior of which reflects the old wooden shtetl style homes. The museum integrates very nicely into the surrounding landscape and the old cemetery.
The museum features nine galleries that trace the history of the Shaduva Jewish community. At the heart of the museum lies the market square gallery, offering an experience of daily Jewish life in the shtetl.
Other galleries consist of autobiographies of locals. A synagogue ark made of layers of etched glass represent the ark of the old wooden synagogue. The Holocaust gallery consists of a general overview of the destruction of the Lithuanian Jewish community.
At the end of the exhibition, there is a memorial hall bearing the names of Lithuanian shtetls that no longer exist. The museum includes a "Canyon of Hope" in a corridor leading to a large window overlooking the old cemetery.
After a guided tour of the museum, we went looking in the cemetery, in hopes of finding some reminder of family members, but did not find any.
The day ended with a lavish reception and concert at which Cantor Helfgott, a world-famous chazan, violinist Pinchas Zuckerman and Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli performed.
The trip was a wonderful and memorable one, both for me and my daughters. It allowed us to learn about our roots in Lithuania and about the life of the Jews which ended so tragically, but which in a way continues today in Israel and in the diaspora.