Entrance Monument to the victims of Paneriai in the Paneriai Memorial. Architect Jaunutis Makariūnas, 1985.
An expedition of the Center for Jewish Art went to Vilnius in November 2022 to document Holocaust memorial monuments in the city. The trip was a part of the pilot project on Holocaust Memorial Monuments with the goal of refining the survey instruments, research questions, and criteria to be used in the monument database.
According to the last pre-war Polish population census of 1931, there were 55,006 Jews in the city, comprising 29% of its population. The majority of Vilnius Jews were murdered during the Nazi occupation.
This expedition in November 2022 documented 50 Holocaust memorial monuments of various types in Vilnius. This number is comparable with the number of Holocaust monuments in Greece, and more than the number in Croatia – two countries whose Holocaust monuments we have already documented.
While the most Jewish communities in Lithuania were annihilated by the end of 1941, Jews would live and be murdered in Vilnius until 1944.
To read more about this important project, click here.
To visit Holocaust Memorial Monuments (A joint project of the Center for Jewish Art at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, The Miller Center/Feldenkreis Program at the University of Miami and the International Survey of Jewish Monuments) click here.