The Great Synagogue, the Gate of Dawn, and What Was Lost

The Great Synagogue of Vilna was built below street level so as not to overtop the churches, and around it stood a courtyard of study houses, a ritual bath, a library and the community offices, so that the whole religious apparatus of a city sat in one block. The Romm press in the same city produced in the 1880s the edition of the Talmud whose pagination and commentary layout became standard everywhere, and the Strashun library made a scholarly collection publicly available. In 1925 the YIVO institute was founded in the city to study Yiddish language and Jewish life scientifically.

Almost all of it was destroyed between 1941 and 1944. Some seventy thousand people, the great majority of the city's Jews, were shot in the forest at Ponary outside Vilnius. A group of ghetto prisoners forced to sort books and documents for a Nazi institute smuggled part of the collection out and hid it, and some of what they saved survives. The ruined Great Synagogue was demolished under Soviet rule and a school built on the site; archaeological work since 2011 has uncovered the bimah and the bathhouse beneath it.

Vilnius is also a Catholic city of the first rank. The image of the Virgin in the Gate of Dawn draws pilgrims from Lithuania and Poland, and it was in Vilnius in the 1930s that a painter produced, to the description of the nun Faustina Kowalska, the first Divine Mercy image, a devotion now practised worldwide.