Today, nothing particularly remarkable can be seen at one of the oldest historical sites in Vilnius. An archaeological excavation is under way on a large empty plot of land surrounded by nondescript apartment blocks. Looking through the gaps in the fence, one can see walls, fragments of floors, and stones protruding from the earth, which has been dug out to considerable depth.
This was once the site of the Great Synagogue of Vilnius, one of the most important buildings of Lithuanian Jewry, and around it stood the Jewish quarter filled with institutions, prayer houses, study houses, mikvehs, shops, and a library. It was this world that earned Vilnius for centuries the name of the Jerusalem of Lithuania, ירושלים דְּלִיטָא Yerushalayim de-Lita.
The particular significance of the current archaeological research lies in the fact that the Great Synagogue is not simply a historic monument destroyed in the war. After the Nazi destruction, the Soviet authorities also removed the ruins, and a school was subsequently built on the site, later replaced by a kindergarten. The synagogue thus disappeared physically from the city's memory as well. The archaeologists are now excavating not merely a building, but bringing back to the surface the material world of a vanished society.
Since the international research project began in 2011, nearly five thousand finds dating from the 16th to the 20th century have been brought to light. The 2026 summer campaign has exposed a larger continuous area than ever before: the monumental central bimah has now been fully excavated, along with further sections of the main prayer hall and the women's gallery.
The site is slowly revealing the place where one of the most important communities of Eastern European Jewry once lived, prayed, studied, debated, traded, and organized its communal life.
Jewish Heritage Europe published a detailed report on August 4 on the current results of the excavations. I am writing this post on the basis of that report and my own previous Jewish heritage tours in Vilnius.
Vilne, the Jerusalem of the North
The Jewish presence in Vilne—as it is known in Yiddish—can be traced back at least to the 15th century, although it was only in 1593 that the community received a privilege that legally consolidated its position.
By the 17th century, Vilne had already become one of the major Jewish centers of Eastern Europe. Around three thousand Jews lived in the city at the time, accounting for a quarter of its total population. The city's rabbinic scholarship developed rapidly, making Vilne one of the most important intellectual centers of Eastern European Jewry. Its symbolic embodiment was the Vilna Gaon, Eliyahu ben Solomon Zalman (1720–1797), who was not a chief rabbi, did not head a community or a yeshiva, and had no disciples, yet was regarded as the greatest Jewish authority of his age, to whom the greatest rabbis of the Jewish world turned for rulings on the most difficult halachic questions. With his extraordinary knowledge, the Gaon was an “institution without an institution,” one of the greatest scholars in Jewish history, who by his very presence made Vilne a center of Orthodox Judaism. Followers, interpreters, and young rabbis gathered around him, and a vast network of synagogues, kloyzn, study houses, libraries, mikvehs, and communal organizations developed around the central building, the Great Synagogue.
The Gaon's grave in the present-day (third) Jewish cemetery of Vilnius, to which it was moved when the oldest cemetery was demolished in the 1950s, and which we will also visit on our Baltic tour next week. The broad double gravestone above the graves marks the graves of the Gaon and his wife, Chana the rebbetzin. I will write another post about the graves.
The predecessor of the Great Synagogue may date back to the privilege of 1593. Around 1633, it was rebuilt as a monumental stone building. The Renaissance-Baroque structure was approximately 25 metres long and 22 metres wide, with a height of 12 metres. The main prayer hall could accommodate 300 people, while the entire religious and communal complex that developed around it could hold several thousand people on festive occasions.
One of the building’s distinctive features was that it was partially sunk into the ground. A Jewish religious building could not rise above the surrounding Christian churches, so the builders lowered the main floor by about two metres below the surrounding ground level. Paradoxically, this decision saved the most important parts of the synagogue centuries later: despite subsequent destruction and construction over the site, a significant part of the original floor level remained underground.
I had the floor plan of the Great Synagogue drawn by AI on the basis of the excavation reports
The interior of the synagogue was exceptionally rich. At its centre stood the bimah, the platform used for reading the Torah. According to historical descriptions, it was a monumental structure surrounded by columns, with a domed space above it. On the eastern wall stood the richly carved and painted Aron ha-Kodesh, the ark containing the Torah scrolls. The women’s prayer areas were arranged on both sides of the Torah ark, on several levels. The walls and ceilings were adorned with bronze and silver chandeliers.
Reconstruction of the bimah from the website The Great Synagogue of Vilnius. A virtual tour
The shulhoyf surrounding the Great Synagogue may be even more important for understanding how Vilne’s Jewish society functioned than the synagogue itself.
The Yiddish word shulhoyf literally means the courtyard of a synagogue, but in the case of Vilnius it referred to much more than that. An entire complex of institutions gradually developed around the Great Synagogue.
The complex contained twelve synagogues and prayer houses, several kloyzim, study houses, communal institutions, a mikveh, a bathhouse, a communal water-supply system, butcher shops, the premises of the community council, and the famous Strashun Library.
The shulhoyf was in fact a kind of Jewish main square. People came here not only to pray, but also to study, hold meetings, engage in charity, trade, meet one another, exchange news and resolve communal conflicts. This is why archaeologists increasingly interpret the Great Synagogue not simply as an archaeological site containing a single synagogue, but as the centre of an entire Jewish urban quarter.
The communal infrastructure was impressive. The bathhouse and mikveh operating in the shulhoyf were connected to a water system; from 1759, a pipeline linked the communal cistern to the Vingrių springs. The sewage system was also connected to the city’s drainage network. Sewer pipes were among the finds uncovered during the 2026 excavations.
It was in this environment that the religious culture associated with the greatest figure of Vilne, the Vilna Gaon, developed. His kloyz, that is, his own prayer house and place of study, was also connected to the complex. In later tradition, this area became one of the symbolic birthplaces of Lithuanian Orthodoxy. By the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, Litvak increasingly came to denote a Jewish cultural type in which strict Orthodox religious observance was combined with an extraordinary intellectual tradition. This was also why the city became a centre for the opponents of Hasidism, the Mitnagdim, who rejected the movement’s emphasis on emotional and mystical religious experience.
In 1808, the first modern Jewish school was also opened, where, in the spirit of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, secular subjects – languages, history, geography and mathematics – were taught as well.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, the city’s Jewish society became extraordinarily diverse. Vilne was simultaneously an important centre of rabbinic scholarship, Hasidism, the Jewish Enlightenment, Zionism, socialism, the Yiddish language and Hebrew education.
The Strashun Library – established from the legacy of the wealthy merchant and scholar Matityahu Strashun – became an important institution of Jewish scholarship. The YIVO (Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut), founded in 1925, one of the most important institutions for the study of the Yiddish language and culture, was also active here. Yiddish newspapers and periodicals were published in the city, theatres operated, books were published, and the circle of young Yiddish writers and poets known as Yung-Vilne also emerged. Tradition and modernity coexisted around the Great Synagogue. By the 19th and 20th centuries, the city had become a cultural metropolis of the Jewish world of Eastern Europe.
In the interwar period, the city’s Jewish population numbered around 60,000, accounting for 30% of the total population.
The destruction
The German army entered Vilne on June 24, 1941, two days after the beginning of the Blitzkrieg.
The Jewish community was destroyed within a few years. The overwhelming majority of the Jewish population was murdered. The Great Synagogue was looted and set on fire.
After the war, however, the ruins of the synagogue and the shulhoyf were still standing. They did not survive the Soviet period. Between 1955 and 1957, the Soviet authorities levelled the ruins, and in 1964 a kindergarten was built on the site. This second destruction, which also sought to erase the physical memory of the community, had at least as profound an impact on the synagogue as the first.
The kindergarten and school concealed the remains of the synagogue for more than half a century. By the time modern archaeology began to investigate the site, almost nothing in the cityscape indicated that one of the most important buildings of Vilne had once stood here.
Yet precisely because of the architectural design, with the building partly sunk into the ground, many of its most important structural elements survived.
The Archaeological Excavation
The first modern archaeological investigations were launched jointly in 2011 by the Israel Antiquities Authority and the Lithuanian Archaeological Society, under the direction of Jon Seligman and with funding from the Goodwill Fund, which administers compensation for Lithuanian communal property.
Ground-penetrating radar surveys confirmed that substantial remains of walls were concealed beneath and around the Soviet-era building. Regular excavations then began, with the 2026 summer campaign marking the sixth excavation season.
In 2018, architectural elements were uncovered that made the location and structure of the bimah, the central platform for reading the Torah, clear. Some of the enormous columns that stood around the bimah were also found.
A particularly important discovery was a Hebrew commemorative inscription dating from 1796, according to which the brothers Eliezer and Shmuel donated the Torah-reading table in memory of their parents, Rabbi Chaim and Sarah. We know that the parents emigrated to Eretz Yisrael, where Chaim worked as a representative of the Vilne community, supporting the local Ashkenazi communities. The archaeological excavation is bringing to light not merely stones, but also the history of the families and society that once existed here.
What is new in the 2026 excavation season is that in 2025 the school building that had concealed the central area of the synagogue for seventy years was demolished. This has enabled archaeologists to gain access to the actual inner core of the building.
Lead archaeologist Jon Seligman in the excavated center of the Great Synagogue
During the summer excavations, the enormous central bimah was fully uncovered, including its colorful terrazzo floor decorated with geometric and floral patterns. This is significant because we are no longer seeing isolated fragments of flooring, but a larger continuous surface that gives us a sense of the synagogue’s interior design and representation. Further sections of the main prayer hall, as well as parts of the women’s gallery, were also uncovered. The continuous spatial complex now makes it possible to reconstruct much more clearly how the building was used.
The excavation of the central area of the Great Synagogue during the 2026 summer excavations (Israel Antiquities Authority Official Channel)
One of the most moving groups of finds from the 2026 season is the metal nameplates that were originally attached to the wooden seats. They bear, in Hebrew letters, the names of the people who used the seats.
This may eventually make it possible, by comparing them with membership lists, communal records, and other historical sources, to connect individual names with the stories of specific families and people. In this way, the synagogue is beginning to return not only as a building, but also as a human community.
“Gitel Klachek, wife of the late Jechezkel, the shamash [caretaker] of the congregation”
Among this year’s finds is an ornamental metal plaque engraved with the Ten Commandments. It reveals another element of the synagogue’s religious and visual program. The inscriptions, carvings, painted walls, and richly decorated flooring of the Great Synagogue together created an exceptionally elaborate interior.
Fragments of a Passover seder plate were also discovered. It was produced by the Fishel Sussmann Kamennij Brodi Faience Factory, one of the largest manufacturers of Jewish ritual vessels. The fragments display the design with which Sussmann conquered the Jewish markets of turn-of-the-century Russia. The inscriptions running around the rim give instructions for the fifteen ritual steps of the seder evening, based on the Haggadah, while the interior of the plate contains recesses for the specifically designated ritual foods – shank bone, egg, bitter herbs, and so on.
A similar Sussmann Passover plate from the collection of the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. The inscriptions in the central section:
• upper right circle: זרוע (z’roa) “arm/foreleg”: roasted bone • upper left circle: ביצה (beitzah) “egg” • central circle: מרור (maror) “bitter herb/horseradish” (in memory of the slavery in Egypt) • lower right circle: חרוסת (charoset): “mortar”: a sweet brown paste made from apples, wine, and spices • lower left circle: כרפס (karpas) “vegetable,” to be dipped in salt water • bottom: חזרת (chazeret) “bitter lettuce”
The site of the Great Synagogue thus preserves not only the world of major communal festivals, but also the material culture of everyday Jewish life.
Perhaps even more revealing, however, are the finds that archaeologists have identified as a dish used for serving gefilte fish and a vessel used for preparing cholent.
One of the important results of the earlier excavations was the discovery of the mikveh complex. The ritual baths were not merely ancillary buildings. They were an important part of the system of Jewish communal life governed by religious law, and their water supply required substantial technical infrastructure.
During the research, water reservoirs, systems connected to the mikvaot, and later elements of the drainage network were uncovered. The sewage pipes discovered in 2026 show that the infrastructure of the shulhoyf complex was highly sophisticated.
This is important because in the archaeology of Jewish urban quarters, it is often precisely the infrastructure that makes it possible to understand how the community functioned.
The Great Synagogue was therefore not an isolated building, but the centre of a living urban system.
But the archaeologists have uncovered not only the remains of the synagogue's heyday, but also traces of its destruction.
Earlier excavations uncovered a huge fallen fragment of a column, demonstrating the intensity of the building's later destruction. Damage was observed on the walls and structural elements that is consistent with the historical fact that the building was damaged during the war and then finally demolished during the Soviet period.
The significance of the 2026 archaeological season lies in the fact that, for the first time, it has become possible to excavate the synagogue's central interior space on a large scale and as a coherent whole. The space is beginning to take shape, raising historical reconstruction to a new level as well.
The greatest scholarly achievement of the excavation is the recovery of the space itself. Archaeologists can now reconstruct with increasing precision how the Great Synagogue and its associated mikvaot, courtyards, and the other kloyzn were arranged in relation to one another.
The shulhoyf was once such a dense institutional system that virtually every important function of Jewish life was represented within it. This world disappeared by the middle of the twentieth century. Archaeology is now restoring its spatial relationships.
This is particularly important in the case of Vilne, because after the Holocaust the city's Jewish history was unable for a long time to return to the urban space. Apart from a few surviving memorial plaques, cemeteries, museum objects, and monuments, the physical cityscape preserved little trace of the community that had once constituted a significant part of the city's population.
The excavation of the Great Synagogue is therefore, in a sense, the redrawing of a vanished city map.
Rebuilding Memory
The excavation does not stand alone.
In May 2026, an exhibition entitled “Unearthing the Great Synagogue of Vilna” opened at the Museum of Jewish Culture and Identity in Lithuania. The exhibition presents objects, architectural fragments, Hebrew inscriptions, coins, historical photographs and reconstructions uncovered during the excavation, as well as post-war paintings by Rafael Chwoles depicting Vilna's Jewish quarter reduced to ruins.
It is easy to tell the story of the Great Synagogue of Vilna as the story of a building that was constructed in the 17th century, became monumental in the 18th century, continued to develop in the 19th century, was damaged in 1941, and then demolished in 1957.
But that is actually misleading.
The Great Synagogue was not a building to which a community happened to belong. It was the other way around: it was the setting and material embodiment of the diverse everyday life and functions of a community numbering many thousands.
The Holocaust, beyond the physical destruction of Vilna's Jewish population, also destroyed an entire cultural ecosystem. Yiddish-language life disappeared, along with bookshops, printing houses, schools, associations, theatres and newspapers, as well as rabbinical families whose histories stretched back centuries. The Great Synagogue disappeared, and the shulhoyf itself disappeared with it.
Soviet urban policy deepened this absence by removing the ruins as well.
Archaeology now seems to be setting in motion a process in the opposite direction.
It is impossible to bring the destroyed community back. It is impossible to rebuild the Vilna that existed before 1941. But it is possible to give it back its place in the history of the city. And perhaps this is the most important result of the excavation of the Great Synagogue.
That is why the 2026 excavation season is a milestone.
For the first time, archaeologists can see much of the central area of the Great Synagogue as a coherent whole. The fully excavated bimah, the colourful terrazzo floor, the main prayer hall, the women's galleries, the nameplates, the metal plaque bearing the Ten Commandments, the seder plate and the vessels of everyday life together create a picture that is far more personal than any historical floor plan could ever be.
Under the ground, it was not simply a ruin that survived: a city survived. A city whose inhabitants, over the course of many centuries, studied, prayed, debated, traded, engaged in charity and raised their children.
The Great Synagogue was the centre of this world.
And when another Hebrew nameplate, a fragment of flooring or an ordinary vessel emerges from the archaeological excavation, it is not simply an anonymous archaeological object that returns: someone returns through it.
This is what makes the excavation of the Great Synagogue of Vilna so special. Here archaeology is not merely reconstructing architecture, but also the material memory of a destroyed European Jewish civilization.
And the 2026 excavation is the most spectacular chapter yet in this return: the heart of the Great Synagogue, the bimah and the main prayer space around it, now exist not only in the world of old photographs and floor plans. They are there again, beneath the ground — and slowly, they are appearing once more on the map of Vilnius.
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