Before leaving Vilnius, some random thoughts and images.

We were invited the other day to the final match of a basketball tournament featuring the Maccabi Tel Aviv junior team and a local sports academy. It was a spirited contest, with some surprising 3-point shooting by both teams, but Maccabi ran away with it in the final period, winning by 12 points.  Basketball, according to several Lithuanians I spoke with, is more popular here than Jesus.

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Highlight of our final week was a lecture by Ellen Cassedy about a Yiddish cookbook, published in Vilna in the 1930s by a woman named Fania Lewando. She led a movement in the interwar years to get local Litvaks to eat better (i.e., less schmaltz, more greens) and published more than 100 vegetarian recipes in this book, as well as running a vegetarian restaurant in the old Jewish section of town. But during the Holocaust her book disappeared, as did Lewando – she was last seen leaving the city with Soviet troops, and never heard from again. A copy was discovered in the 1990s, and was translated and republished by a New York Yiddishist and foodie named Eve Jochnowitz. In preparation for Ellen’s talk, students at the Yiddish Institute prepared Lewando-inspired recipes, and a delightful lunch was had by all.

Below. clockwise: Ellen Cassedy with the edibles, Tanja Yakovleva with her geshmak kartoffel-varenikes, Corbin Allardice explaining his recipe; Michael Yashinsky with Lewando’s book.

Seems like there’s been a lot of breaking news about Jewish Vilna during our time here. First a local paper reported that restoration work would begin soon on this abandoned synagogue building, below. Then we read that researchers using radar had located foundation stones from the Great Shul, which the Soviets pulled down after the war and replaced with a nondescript school structure. If the wires are to be believed, archeologists will begin next year to excavate around the old structure, although the project’s final goal remains unclear.