![]() There were over 110 synagogues and 10 yeshivas in Vilnius alone. Wilno, as it was called then, had a Jewish community of nearly 100,000, about 45% of the city's total population. ![]() Prior to World War II, the Lithuanian Jewish population comprised some 160,000 people, or about 7% of the total population. The inter-war Republic of Lithuania was home to a large and influential Jewish community its members either fled the country or were murdered during the Holocaust in Lithuania which began in 1941. Chaim Grade (1910–1982) was born in Vilna, the city about which he would write. Rabbi Elijah ben Solomon Zalman (1720–1797) to give his rarely used full name, helped make Vilna (modern-day Vilnius) a world center for Talmudic learning. No other Jew is more closely linked to a specifically Lithuanian city than the Vilna Gaon (in Yiddish, "the genius of Vilna"). The area where Lithuanian Jews lived is referred to in Yiddish as ליטע Lite, hence the Hebrew term Lita'im ( לִיטָאִים). The term is sometimes used to cover all Haredi Jews who follow an Ashkenazi, non- Hasidic style of life and learning, whatever their ethnic background. ![]() ![]() Lithuanian Jews or Litvaks ( Yiddish: ליטװאַקעס, romanized: Litvakes) are Jews with roots in the territory of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania (covering present-day Lithuania, Belarus, Latvia, the northeastern Suwałki and Białystok regions of Poland, as well as adjacent areas of modern-day Russia and Ukraine). Map showing percentage of Jews in the Pale of Settlement in the Russian Empire c. ![]()
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