Survivor speaheading effort to build replica shtetl in Israel

TORONTO - Prof. Yaffa Eliach latest project is more ambitious than anything she's done before, but underlying it is a simple approach to teaching the lessons of the Holocaust. "I can't understand," says one of the world's foremost Holocaust scholars, "why our focus has been on death and destruction, and not life." Eliach, creator of the Tower of Life, a mesmerizing photo exhibit in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, believes that to defeat Hitler, it's as important to teach about Jewish living as it is to teach about Jews who have died - to show the world the vitality, the throb, the beauty of pre-war Jewish life in Europe. Acting on the obligation, she has undertaken to rebuild a vanished past - literally. Working with the municipality of Rishon Le-Zion in Israel and an array of engineers, architects and historians, Eliach is spearheading her dream of building a scale replica of Eishyshok, the 900-year-old Lithuanian Shtetl where she was born and raised, and most of whose Jewish residents were slaughtered by Nazi troops in 1941. To be located on 121 acres in southwest Rishon Le-Zion, Israel's restoration will include synagogues, yeshivot, stables, homes, cobblestone streets, restaurants, even a castle - all a permanent physical recreation of a lost world. As Eliach notes, this won't be for those who want to forget, but for those who want to remember. "Every place has restored its past. The Jewish people haven't," said Eliach, who was in town recently to deliver the Ruth Kelman Lecture at Beth Jacob

Synagogue and to drum up support for her Shtetl Foundation, which aims to raise $50 million worldwide for the project (the Israeli government has promised to match all funds raised, meaning the entire restoration will cost around $100 million.) "Restoring life is the most important element in documenting history. When this is complete, I will be able to tell my children and 13 grandchildren that Hitler lost, and we won," she said. Groundbreaking is slated for next spring; completion in five or six years. Eliach envisions a full, interactive Shtetl experience, a yiddishe version of Black Creek Pioneer Village, the Toronto colonial attraction where employees dress in period costumes and go about chores of yore. In the "new" Eishyshok, once home to 3,500 Jews and 500 non-Jews, visitors, who will pay an entrance fee, will be able to study at the yeshiva; partake in hearty fare at the local eatery (complete with authentic menus); shop in the central marketplace; see Yiddish theatre; visit the cemetery; stay in a hotel; even get married in the style of the time in a torch-lit procession on Friday afternoon, accompanied by klezmer music. Children will even be able to take classes at the local cheder. "It will bring back wonderful memories," says Eliach; evocations, she says, not of victims or quaint characters from Fiddler on the Roof, but of real people; real sights, sounds and smells of how we once lived, played and worked. She's hoping that thousands of people will come, including youths who routinely visit the sites of European death camps. Eliach says the project is generating huge interest in Israel. Already, local artists and actors have expressed interest in working in the Shtetl. Rabbis want to be a part of it too. Even the woods that surrounded Eishyshok will be recreated, as will a river that flowed through the town. A small bridge over the river is where the rabbi blessed people who were departing for Palestine, Eliach remembers. "I'm the only person in the world who has plans to build wooden synagogues," laughs Eliach about her blueprints of the shtetl's two main shuls. On a more somber note, she plans to recreate every last tombstone that was in the Jewish cemetery. Eliach, who has taught at Brooklyn College for over 20 years and assembled Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust, got the idea for her monumental project following completion of her latest book, There Once Was a World: A 900-Year Chronicle of the Shtetl of Eishyshok, an 800-page tribute detailing every aspect of life, Jewish holidays, people and places. Her connection with Eishyshok is deep: her family, the Sonensohns, were among the first to settle the town in 1065. It all ended in the autumn of 1941, when, in the course of two days, the town's Jews were rounded up and machine-gunned into mass graves. Eliach's father was able to get the family into hiding. In 1944, following the area's liberation by Soviet troops, Eliach, then just six years old, witnessed her mother and baby brother being shot to death by members of the Polish Home Army. In all, just 29 Jews from Eishyshok survived the war. Eliach spent two decades tracking down thousands of photographs of the town for the Tower of Life. Now, she's scouring municipal records for plans, blueprints and pictures of buildings, and she's talking to fellow survivors - anything that will bring more authenticity to the replica. Today, Eishyshok, near the border with Belarus, is a hardscrabble place of 3,000 souls, many of them Gypsies. One synagogue was turned into a sports complex and is now abandoned. Another was simply leveled. The beit midrash is now a cinema. A school stands on the site of the old cemetery. There are no Jews left, and every effort has been made to expunge from memories that Jews ever lived there. "The locals say the buildings never belonged to Jews," says Eliach. "There is no mention of Jews anywhere." Thus all the more reason to recreate it. "In a sense," she explains, “we are closing the door to a vanished past so that we can have a living, breathing town." The Shtetl Foundation of Canada may be reached at 905-731-8117.

By Ron Csillag