The Jewish Week - May 26, 2000
NEW YORK - The southwest corner of Rishon
Lezion, Israel’s fourth-largest city, is empty. “Only sand,” says Mayor Meir
Nitzan. “They were going to build a golf course on it,” says Yaffa Eliach.
Eliach — Holocaust survivor, historian and author — sees another future for the
space: horse market and stable, castle and forest, stone-paved streets and
Yiddish-speaking “residents.” Eliach wants to rebuild Eishyshok, her childhood
shtetl, in the center of Israel.
Actually, her dream is a “full-size
replica” of the village where some 3,500 Jews and 500 non-Jews lived in western
Lithuania (Poland in the intra-war period) before World War II. “A Jewish
Williamsburg,” a yiddishe version of the Colonial Virginia community where
actors dress in period costumes and portray a vanished life, Eliach says. “It
will be wonderful for Jewish education.” Eliach, who has restored Eishyshok’s
memory with photographs in a three-story Tower of Life at the U.S. Holocaust
Memorial Museum, and with text and photos in “There Once Was
A World: A 900-Year Chronicle of the
Shtetl of Eishyshok” (Little, Brown & Company, 1998), established The
Shtetl Foundation in December to perpetuate her community with people and
buildings. (The foundation’s address: 300 E. 54th St., Suite 23-K, NY, NY 10022.)
She has started to raise $100 million.
Groundbreaking at the 120-acre site allocated by Rishon Lezion is set for next
spring; completion, in five or six years. “It will show how great Jewish life
was” before the Holocaust, says Eliach, an Upper East Side resident who signed
an agreement with Mayor Nitzan last week. Like the exhibit and book, the
rebuilt shtetl will show religious and secular life, rabbis and meshuggenas —
“the fullness of their humanity, not simply … quaint characters in a ‘Fiddler
on the Roof’ production or emaciated victims in concentration camp photos.”
Israelis, who for years scorned their Old Country roots, “are more open today”
to such a project, which emphasizes shtetl life and the mama loshen, Nitzan
says. Rishon Lezion high schools started offering Yiddish classes five years
ago, he says. “We miss something from the past.” “I have an obligation, to
rebuild the vanished past,” Eliach says. “Maybe that is why I survived.”
By Steve Lipman