Exhibition sheds light on historic Lithuanian Jewish communities

A free exhibition bringing together photographs, letters and personal stories collated by British Jews of Lithuanian descent launched at JW3 in north London on Sunday. 

Against the backdrop of a Klezmer band, around 50 guests, some of whom had flown in from New York and South Africa, viewed the large panels featuring images of shtetls, traditional recipes, families, wedding photographs and old family homes long since abandoned.

‘Litvak Life’ traces a vibrant and deeply rooted society and follows the largest wave of Jewish migration in modern history between 1881 and 1914, reflecting on how the Lithuanian Jewish diaspora continues to shape life in Britain today.

The project to preserve their collective heritage began in 2017, when family members began uploading their photographs to a shared Google drive.

Co-organiser and South African Litvak Dani Jaff-Klein, who recently organised a heritage trip for 21 family members to Lithuania, shared that the project was put on hold firstly due to Covid and then 7 October 2023, after “no one really had an appetite to do an exhibition about Litvaks, so we had to pause again.

“And then last December”, she added, “on a cold, dark Shabbat afternoon, I invited my young cousin Leila Kuper from Paris, who at the time was studying social anthropology in Brighton, to tea. We looked through the photos together, and I told her about my long-held ambition to create an exhibition. ‘Well, why don’t you?’ she asked. And so this crazy journey began.”

Jaff-Klein and Kuper were “astonished to discover so many of the same photographs, the same faces and family members; we saw all of these in my grandfather and his siblings’ treasured albums that we we had seen over the years. It was an extraordinary revelation. These old black and white photographs, which had always seemed to belong to a distant, vanished world, suddenly connected us to living, scattered to living people scattered across the globe.”

She added: “We used to pore over them and wonder who these people were. They were pictures, of course, of the alter heim, the old homeland. But there was nothing particularly old-fashioned about the people in these photographs. They were worldly, sophisticated, learned, stylish, even cool, and their lives seemed full of intrigue and untold stories.

“Everyone in the photographs seemed to be connected to everyone else. Cousins appeared in each other’s photos. Families overlapped, and gradually a whole world began to emerge. I became so captivated by these photos and by the world that they represented that I began dreaming of an exhibition almost as soon as I saw them online.”

The duo were adamant that the photos would act as a starting point to explore the wider world of Jewish Lithuania, and together, they began interviewing other Litvaks, “listening to their family stories, discovering extraordinary collections of photos, letters, and memories.”

After a relative told them that knowing about her past made her feel safer, Jaff-Klein considered that “these stories give us a sense of belonging, connecting us not only to the past but also to the future. They remind us that we are a part of something much larger than our own small individual lives.”

More than that, she adds, reflecting on the wealth of materials they have gathered and noting that a recent, online Zoom meeting brought together 81 relatives and lasted four hours, “you find something of yourself in the lives that they lived, whether it’s the values, the humour or an aesthetic.”

Praising her young cousin, Leila Kuper, an anthropology student at the University of Sussex who led the research, Jaff-Klein said: “You took on a challenge when it was still little more than an idea and without you, we would never have begun. Your curiosity, your determination, your dedication, your focus have been of truly epic proportion.”

Standing on a chair to address the room, Kuper responded: “Dani proposed this project to me as a summer job. It turned out to be a bit more. The research process has been extremely fulfilling and difficult, and I’m so proud of what we’ve achieved.”

Admitting that when she started, “I didn’t know anything about Litvak history”, she shared that between 1881 and the beginning of the First World War, around two and a half million Jews left the Pale settlement, the area that Jews had been confined to in the Russian Empire.

“A disproportionate amount of them came from the northern provinces of the Pale, which is where Litvaks lived,” she said. “So from that period, vast networks of Litvaks were created between Lithuania and all these mostly Anglo countries, where people had arrived, and so there were continuous flows of letters, care packages, money, but also people.

“We heard stories of people going back to their shtetls after they had emigrated in order to find someone to marry. People followed each other to places where they already knew people, and as a consequence, large parts of Jewish communities would sometimes uproot and reconstitute themselves in a whole other part of the world.”

She discovered that people sometimes returned to visit their old shtetls in Lithuania up until the mid 1930s for funerals or for marriages, and “this created these dystopian pictures that we also saw, where people who had left were standing with people who were to perish a few years later in the Holocaust.”

What Kuper wants is “for you to remember how they lived. Our span of time is quite short because we mostly have pictures from the end of the 19th to the 20th centuries, because that’s what the families we interviewed had. But Jews were in Lithuania since the 1300s, and they’d always been seen as an outside group. Their role in the shadows, which was where they lived for most of their time in Lithuania, was traders and artisans.

“Jews were weavers, bakers, shoemakers, tailors, and shtetls are essentially market towns. And the reason we associate them with Jews is because Jews ran the markets. They weren’t allowed to own their own land for most of the time, and so they couldn’t be agricultural workers like the vast majority of non-Jews or communities.”

Jewish News understands that ‘Litvak Life’ has been invited to the Japanese consulate in Kaunas, Lithuania, now the Sugihara House Museum, where diplomat Chiune Sugihara issued life-saving “Visas for Life” to thousands of Jewish refugees; Lithuanian communities in Brazil and Israel have also expressed interest.

With many of the images, letters and stories reflecting Jewish family members who perished in the Holocaust, Jaff-Klein notes: “Their live were cut short. Their stories were cut short”, but adds that the exhibition “connected us to so many of the living relatives and that’s just an extraordinary thing to suddenly find you’ve got family all over the world”.

• Litvak Life exhibition runs until 11 November at JW3; open 10am to 10pm Sunday to Thursday, and 10am to 3pm on Friday. Closed Saturday. No booking needed.