Boston’s Jewish Past

June 18, 2008

by Daniel E. Levenson

Many people have asked me in the last few months how I came up with the name for this online Jewish publication. It’s a good question, and I have in fact had a few people who wanted to know more about us simply because the word “Vilna” is in our name, and it piqued their interest because they had relatives in Vilna (or in a few cases, had actually come from Vilna themselves). The idea for the name “New Vilna Review” came to me while I was reading a biography of Abraham Joshua Heschel, and in this volume, the Jewish world of pre-World War Two Vilna was described in vivid detail as a vibrant landscape of Jewish learning and culture, with groups ranging from socialist Zionists to traditional orthodox rabbis and their followers. When the Nazis came to Vilna, however, most of this was completely destroyed.

At the time that I was reading this I was also looking for a name for the at-the-time unnamed online Jewish publication that I had been thinking of starting, and it occurred to me that what we were trying to do online was to recreate some of that breadth and depth of Jewish knowledge, debate and discussion in our own time that once existed in Vilna, using the technology available to us. In doing so, I hope we are paying homage to this bygone era and helping to keep alive this tradition.

Here in Boston there is also place called the Vilna Shul, which is on Beacon Hill. This shul derives its name from the Jewish immigrants who built it nearly 90 years ago, immigrants from Vilna who came to America looking for a chance at a better life. Sometimes when I tell people in the Boston area the name of this publication they ask if we are connected to the shul, which we aren’t (although we are certainly open to the idea of collaborating with them in the future) but I do think that we have some goals in common, including that of helping to preserve and enrich Jewish cultural life.

One of the interesting things about the Vilna Shul is the way it is used – once a month on Friday nights and on the high holidays “Havuarah on the Hill,”  a group of young adults in their 20’s and 30’s holds services in the sanctuary and events on other holidays. The shul is also home to the Boston Center for Jewish Culture, which regularly brings in speakers on a variety of topics, and there is also an exhibition space. It is the exhibition space which recently drew me to the Vilna Shul on a warm June afternoon to see an exhibit entitled “The Boston Jewish Experience: Reconnect to the Tapestry,” which featured many photographs of Boston’s old Jewish neighborhoods, from the West End to Dorchester and Mattapan, that had once been major centers of Jewish life and culture for immigrants in Boston.

Although I had grown up hearing stories from my grandmother about her experiences as a first-generation American in these same neighborhoods, I had never really seen any images from that era, so I was especially excited to see the black and white photos on display at the exhibit. From images of Yiddish and Hebrew signs hanging over shops, to those of patrons gathered at a local deli on Blue Hill Avenue, the photos on display chronicle the rise and eventually decline of a world that was once an important center of Jewish life in America, but essentially vanished as Jewish immigrants climbed the socio-economic ladder relatively quickly in the middle of the twentieth century and left these urban enclaves for the suburbs of Newton, Sharon and beyond. In some sense, this too is a vanished world, one in which new arrivals continued to maintain the same cultural and religious institutions that have sustained the Jewish people throughout 2,000 years of wandering, within a structure that closely resembled life in the Old Country, but which was largely abandoned with economic prosperity. Just as we need to remember the way life was during the time when Jewish culture flourished in Europe, I think it’s also important for us to be aware of the early roots of the Jewish community here in America. If we are to have a vibrant Jewish future, we must also be aware of our living Jewish past. In creating this exhibition the Vilna Shul is helping us to do just that.