Records of the Vilna Jewish Community Council

The Vilna Kehillah archive includes documents related to the activities of the Vilna Jewish community board, the Kehillah and its auxiliary institutions, covering the period from 1800 to 1940. It mostly includes correspondence of the Kehillah with the authorities of the day-Russian, German, Polish; announcements of the Kehillah, lists of persons receiving charitable aid, materials on Kehillah elections, invoices from vendors and contractors, petitions from individuals, personal documents. The records are quite fragmentary with the bulk relating to the New Kehillah, in the interwar Poland.

The earliest pre-1844 Kehillah documents are related to the economic activities, litigations regarding the Kehillah real estate, sale of kosher meat, contacts with the local Russian authorities. Some of them bear the stamp of the S. Ansky Jewish Historical-Ethnographic Society, which suggests that at some point they were separated from the main Kehillah archive.

The Tsedakah Gedolah documents from1844 through 1915 relate to the administrative, financial and economics activities, hiring of rabbis and cantors, charity work, Jewish education matters, kosher meat tax, maintenance of buildings, cemeteries, and other property. Represented in the collection are documents and some minutes of the committees: Rabbinic, Charity, Cemetery, Financial, Administrative, Management, and Audit. The majority of the Tsedakah Gedolah documents consist of correspondence with Russian authorities on questions ranging from the care of the homeless Jewish orphans to the changes in Russian legislation concerning Jews in the Pale of Settlement.

The 1915-1919 period includes documents about distribution of the relief aid, mostly from the American and German Jewish sources. Tsedakah Gedolah played a significant role in the Central Relief Committee, and the documents of that Committee are represented in the collection. There are minutes of the administrative board meetings, lists of people receiving aid, correspondence with German occupation authorities.

The Kehilla elections on December 25, 1918, are represented by the Elections committee correspondence, campaign materials of the participating Jewish political parties and groups, lists of candidates, list of the New Kehillah council members. Important materials represent the catastrophic situation of Vilna Jews during the so called “Vilna dispute” by which name the conflict in 1919-1920 between Poland, Soviet Russia and Lithuania for the possession of Vilna is known. When the Bolsheviks came to Vilna, the Soviet power was established for three months and the Kehillah was shut down, its activities banned. As Vilna was taken over by the Polish army, a string of vicious pogroms and plundering took place that resulted in the deaths of many Jews. The revived Kehilla received hundreds of petitions from the victims, which are present in the collection. There is also some correspondence with the Lithuanian authorities which briefly ruled Vilna in 1920.

The later documents reflect relations of the New Kehillah with the Polish authorities through the interwar period. Records of the departments of the New Kehillah, include Managing committee, Personnel, Finance, Social Welfare, Children’s Welfare, Public Health, Education, Religious, and Legal departments. Many materials relate to the Kehillah health care institutions, especially the Zwierzyniec Children’s Hospital. A large number of documents define relations of the Vilna Kehillah with other Jewish community organizations throughout the Polish Republic. A significant body of documents covers the negotiations and drafting of agreements between the Tsedakah Gedolah supervisors and the New Kehillah authorities. The collection also includes documents of the Jewish Refugee Relief Committee, established at the beginning of World War II under the auspices of the Kehillah That committee functioned during1939-1940.

The Vilna Kehillah archive allows to study aspects and the mechanism of Jewish autonomy by illustrating the role of Jewish community institutions in Vilna., and to trace the treatment of the Jewish population by Russian and Polish rulers. It sheds light on the Jewish communal activities during extremely hard times of wars and occupations. It also allows glimpses into the everyday life of Jews in Vilna, their economic condition, and the state of their physical well-being. It ultimately illuminates almost all spheres of life of the Vilna Jews, from religion to health care, from education to nutrition. Noteworthy is the large volume of documents on the topic of the kosher meat-its production, taxation, distribution and consumption.

A number of documents relate to the activities of prominent personalities who resided in Vilna, such as Rabbi Chaim Oyzer Grodzienski (Grodzinski), Tsemakh Shabad, Jacob Wygodzki, Max Weinreich, Zalman Reisen, Khaykl Lunski and others.

The collection is a valuable source in genealogical research considering a great number of lists of population with names and birthdates indicated, and a large number of personal documents, some with photographs