Page - 25 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 4/2018

Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 4 2o18 Katy Beinart | Khlebosolny/Bread and Salt 25 Jatkowa Street, Vilnius, Lithuania: Ar pamenate į Meisels? (2012)27 Arriving in Vilnius, where we were staying with an artist friend, we explored the old city, which was also the location of the former Jewish Ghetto. A memorial plaque showed the location of the ‘small’ and ‘big’ ghettos (figure 10), but few other physical remnants of the heritage of the Jewish community remained in these sites. Historically, Vilnius had been the centre of a large Jew- ish community and a focus of Judaic religious culture in Europe; it was known as “the Jerusalem of the north”.28 According to the 1897 cen- sus, Jews constituted 38.8 per cent of the city’s population, amounting to 64,000 individuals.29 By the early twentieth century, half of the city’s population of 120,000 were Jews, most of whom spoke Yiddish. The city was also a focus for the Yiddish language, and it was home to the famed Yiddish Institute of Higher Learning (YIVO), which was relocated to New York in 1940,30 as well as the Strashum Library, which housed the world’s largest collection of Yiddish language books.31 Under the Nazis, Jews were corralled first into the ‘small’ ghetto and later into the ‘big’ ghetto, from where they were subsequently taken to be liquidated.32 We had been in touch with a distant relative on a family tree website who had told us that we had ancestors, the Meisels, who had lived in the old city in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Rabbi Moishe Meisels, Rebecca’s and my fifth great-grandfather, was born in the city in 1759 and was a renowned rabbi, leading the Chassidic community in Vilnius until 1816 when he emigrated to what was then Palestine.33 According to Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, Meisels also acted as a spy for the Russian army during the Napoleonic wars, and was fluent in German, Russian, Polish and French.34 In the local archives we found records 27 Katy and Rebecca Beinart, Ar pamenate į Meisels?, performance, photographic documentation, 27 July 2012. 28 Carmelo Lisciotto, ‘The Vilnius ghetto: Jewish life in Vilnius/Vilna’ (Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team, 2007), Holocaust Research Project website: <http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/ghettos/vilnius. html> [accessed 10 July 2017]. 29 Lisciotto, ‘The Vilnius Ghetto’. 30 YIVO website: <https://www.yivo.org/History-of-YIVO> [accessed 10 July 2017]. 31 Lisciotto, ‘The Vilnius Ghetto’. 32 Lisciotto, ‘The Vilnius Ghetto’. 33 See ‘Bonaparte-and-the-Chassid’, Chabad website: <http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/1155/jew- ish/Bonaparte-and-the-Chassid.htm> [accessed 10 July 2017]; originally published in Yanki Tauber, Once Upon a Chassid: The Wisdom and the Whimsy, the Fire and the Joy: Stories, Anecdotes and Sayings (Brooklyn, NY: Kehot Publication Society, 1994). 34 ‘Bonaparte-and-the-Chassid’. Figure 10: Ghetto map, Vilnius. Photograph: Katy Beinart. Source: author.