Vilnius

Elijah ben Solomon Zalman, known as the Gaon of Vilna, never held a rabbinic post and never led a congregation. He studied, mostly alone, in a room the community supported him in, and his authority came from what he knew: the whole of the Talmud and its commentaries, the legal codes, the kabbalistic literature, and enough mathematics and astronomy to work on the calendrical passages. He was prepared to emend the text of the Talmud where he judged it corrupt, and he pushed students towards the plain sense of a passage rather than towards the ingenuity that dominated the yeshivas of the time.

When the Hasidic movement spread north from Ukraine, he opposed it absolutely. Bans were issued from Vilna in 1772 and again in 1781, forbidding marriage with Hasidim, closing their prayer houses and ordering their books burned. What he objected to was not warmth in prayer but the doctrine of a leader through whom the divine is accessed, and the displacement of study from the centre of Jewish life. The Hasidim answered in kind, and both sides at various points denounced the other to the imperial authorities.

The consequence was a Lithuanian style of Judaism, whose adherents were called Misnagdim, opponents, defined by rigorous textual study. His student Hayyim of Volozhin founded a yeshiva in 1803 as an institution in its own right, drawing students from everywhere and funded by the wider community, and every non Hasidic yeshiva since is descended from that model.

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.