Jewish urbanization and the midsize city: the case of Kaunas, Lithuania

EN[...] The history of the Jewish community of Kaunas, as well as of this city in general, has not received proper attention in historical research. Unlike the historical capital of Lithuania, Vilnius, and its Jewish community, Kaunas has largely remained on the margins of historical research. An initial, and very partial, attempt to describe the early history of the Jewish community in this city was made in the early 1930s by the journalist David Lippman in his book on the history of the Jews in Kaunas and the adjacent suburb of Sloboda. This was part of his historiographical project on the history of the Jews of Lithuania, which unfortunately did not come to fruition. Lippman published only the first part of this book, which ends at the middle the nineteenth century, just before the beginning of the dramatic changes that the local Jewish community underwent. Another overview of the history of the Jewish community in Kaunas was published by Miriam Niv in 1996. An initial and significant contribution to the issue discussed here is Remigijus Civinskas’s article, “Kauno žydų integracija į miestiečių luomą” [Integration of Kaunas’ Jews into the Townspeople Estate], which deals with the early stages of the process and especially in its political context. Along these lines, the recently published catalogue Žydų gyvenimas Kaune iki Holokausto [Jewish Life in Kaunas before the Holocaust] by Michailas Duškesas is also an important contribution to our knowledge and the research of Jewish life in Kaunas. [...].The emerging reality of Kaunas during this period can be seen as a kind of laboratory, where two complex experiments were simultaneously carried out-an attempt to design a national-cultural environment by the ethnic Lithuanian majority group, certainly after the 1926 coup d’état, and at the same time an attempt to design a new Jewish living space by tending to reduce the national aspect while focusing on the economic and cultural aspects. Both experiments were carried out on a “substrate” of accelerated urbanization processes. As for the results of these experiments, however, unfortunately the historical reality, and especially the dramatic events that took place in Lithuania in the early 1940s, did not allow these experiments to reach their full potential. Everything written above is only a preliminary discussion of the cultural, demographic, economic, religious, and social processes that Jewish society in Kaunas went through from the mid-nineteenth century until World War II. However, this community, which played a central and crucial role in the history of Lithuanian Jewry, undoubtedly deserves a wide and in-depth study. [Extract, p. 123-124, 132]