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American Jews created historic summer camps. Or did summer camps create American Jews?
(JTA) — Among Sandra Fox’s most memorable finds during her years mining American archives for materials about Jewish summer camps was a series of letters about the hours before lights-out.
The letters were by counselors who were documenting an unusual window in the day when they stopped supervising campers, leaving the teens instead to their own devices, which sometimes included romance and sexual exploration.
“It was each division talking about how they dealt with that free time before bed in ‘age-appropriate ways,’” Fox recalled about the letters written by counselors at Camp Ramah in Wisconsin, the original iteration of the Conservative movement’s network of summer camps.
“I’ve spoken to Christian people who work at Christian camps and have researched Christian camps. There is no free time before bed,” Fox told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “That’s not a thing if you don’t want kids to hook up. So it was just amazing to find these documents of Camp Ramah leaders really having the conversation explicitly. Most of the romance and sexuality stuff is implicit in the archives.”
The letters are quoted extensively in Fox’s new book, “The Jews of Summer: Summer Camp and Jewish Culture in Postwar America.” Fox, who earned a PhD in history from New York University in 2018 and now teaches and directs the Archive of the American Jewish Left there, tells the story of American Judaism’s most immersive laboratory for constructing identity and contesting values.
Next week, Fox is launching the book with an event at Congregation Beth Elohim in Park Slope, Brooklyn. (Tickets for the Feb. 23 event are available here.) Attendees will be able to tour adult versions of some of the most durable elements of Jewish summer camps, from Israeli dance to Yiddish and Hebrew instruction to Color Wars to Tisha B’Av, the mournful holiday that always falls over the summer.
“I never considered doing a normal book party,” Fox said. “It was always really obvious to me that a book about experiential Jewish education and role play should be celebrated and launched out into the world through experiential education and role play.”
Sandra Fox’s 2023 book “The Jews of Summer,” looks at the history of American Jewish summer camps. (Courtesy of Fox)
We spoke to Fox about her party plans, how Jewish summer camps have changed over time and how they’ve stayed the same, and the cultural history of that before-bed free time.
This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity. We’ll be continuing the conversation in a virtual chat through the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research Feb. 27 at 1 p.m.; register here.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: Given how much Jews like to talk about camp, were you surprised that this book hadn’t already been written?
Sandra Fox: There’s been a lot of fruitful research on the history of various camps, but it’s usually been focused on one camping movement or one camp type. So there are articles about Zionist camps. There are certainly articles out there about the Ramah camps. A lot of camps have produced books — either their alumni associations or a scholar who went to let’s say, Reform movement camps have created essay collections about those camps. And there are also books about Habonim and other Zionist youth movements.
I don’t really know why this is the first stab at this kind of cross-comparison. It might be that people didn’t think there would be so much to compare. I think the overwhelming feeling I get from readers so far, people who preordered and gotten their books early, is that they’re very surprised to hear how similar these camps are. So perhaps it’s that scholars weren’t thinking about Jewish summer camps that came from such diverse standpoints as having something enough in common to write about them all at once.
Also distance from the time period really helps. You can write a book about — and people do write a book about — the ’60s and ’70s and have been for decades, but there’s a certain amount of distance from the period that has allowed me to do this, I think, and maybe it also helps that I’m generationally removed. A lot of the scholars who’ve worked on camps in the postwar period went to camps in the postwar period. It makes a lot of sense that it would be harder to write this sort of sweeping thing perhaps. The fact that I’m a millennial meant that I could write about the postwar period — and also write kind of an epilogue-style chapter that catches us up to the present.
What’s clear is that there’s something amazing about studying summer camp, a completely immersive 24/7 experience that parents send children away for. There’s no better setting for thinking about how adults project their anxieties and desires about the future onto children. There’s also no place better to think about power dynamics and age and generational tension.
I was definitely struck by the “sameyness” of Jewish camps in your accounting. What do you think we can learn from that, either about camps or about us as Jews?
I do want to say that while there’s a lot of sameyness, whenever you do a comparative study, there’s a risk of kind of collapsing all these things and making them seem too similar. What I’m trying to convey is that the camp leaders from a variety of movements took the basic structure of the summer camp as we know it — its daily schedule, its environment, its activities — and it did look similar from camp to camp, at least on that surface level.
If you look at the daily schedules in comparison, they might have a lot of the same features but they’ll be called slightly different things depending on if the camp leans more heavily towards Hebrew, or Yiddish, or English. But the content within those schedules would be rather different. It’s more that the skeletal structure of camp life has a lot of similarities across the board and then the details within each section of the day or the month had a lot of differences.
But I think what it says is that in the postwar period, the anxieties that Jewish leaders had about the future of Judaism are really, really similar and the solution that they found within the summer camp, they were pretty unanimous about. They just then took the model and inserted within it their particular nationalistic, linguistic or religious perspectives. So I think more so than saying anything about American Jewry, it shows kind of how flexible camping is. And that’s not just the Jewish story. Lots of different Americans have embraced summer camping in different ways.
So many people who have gone to camp have a fixed memory of what camp is like, where it’s caught in time, but you argue that camps have actually undergone lots of change. What are the most striking changes you documented, perhaps ones that might have been hard for even insiders to discern as they happened?
First of all, the Israel-centeredness of American Jewish education as we know it today didn’t happen overnight in 1948, for instance. It was a slower process, beyond the Zionist movements where that was already going on, for decades before 1948. Ramah and the Reform camps for instance took their time towards getting to the heavily Zionist-imbued curricula that we know.
There was considerable confusion and ambivalence at first about what to do with Israel: whether to raise an Israeli flag, not because they were anti-Zionist, but because American Jews had been thinking about proving their loyalty to America for many generations. There were some sources that would talk about — what kind of right do American Jews have to raise the Israeli flag when they’re not Israeli? So that kind of Israel-centeredness that is really a feature of camp life today was a slower process than we might think.
It fit camp life really well because broader American camps used Native American symbols, in some ways that are problematic today, to create what we know of as an iconography of camp life. So for Jews, Israel and its iconography, or Palestine and iconography before ’48, provided an alternative set of options that were read as Jewish, but it still took some time to get to where we are now in terms of the Israel focus.
One of the reasons I place emphasis on the Yiddish summer camps is to show that in the early 20th century and the mid-20th century there was more ideological diversity in the Jewish camping sphere, including various forms of Yiddishist groups and socialist groups and communist groups that operated summer camps. Most of them have closed, and their decline is obviously a change that tells a story of how American Jewry changed over the course of the postwar period. Their legacy is important, too: I have made the argument that these camps in a lot of ways modeled the idea of Yiddish as having a future in America.
What about hookup culture? Contemporary discourse about Jewish camps have focused on sex and sexuality there. What did you observe about this in the archives?
I think people think of the hookup culture of Jewish camps today and certainly in my time in the ’90s and 2000s as a permanent feature, and in some ways I found through my research and oral history interviews that that was the case, but it was really interesting to zoom out a little bit and think about how Jewish summer camps changed in terms of sexual romantic culture, in relationship to how America changed with the sexual revolution and the youth culture.
It’s not it’s not useful to think about Jewish hookup culture in a vacuum. It’s happening within America more broadly. And so of course, it’s changed dramatically over time. And one of the things I learned that was so fascinating is that Jewish summer camps were actually their leaders were less concerned in a lot of ways about sexuality at camp in the ’40s and ’50s, than they were in the late ’60s and ’70s. Because earlier premarital sex was pretty rare, at least in the teenage years, so they were not that concerned about what happened after lights out because they kind of assumed whatever was going on was fairly innocent.
In the late 1960s and 1970s, that’s when camps have to actually think about how to balance allowance and control. They want to allow campers to have these relationships, to have their first sexual experiences, and part of that is related to rising rates of intermarriage and wanting to encourage love between Jews, but they also want to control it because there’s a broader societal moment in which the sexuality of teenagers is problematized and their and their sexual culture is more public.
There’s been a real wave of sustained criticism by former campers about the cultures that they experienced, arguing that the camps created an inappropriately sexualized and unsafe space. There’s been a lot of reaction to that and the broader #MeToo moment. I’m curious about what you can speculate about a future where that space is cleaned up, based on your historical research — what is gained and what, potentially, could be lost?
Without being involved in camping today — and I want to really make that disclaimer because I know a lot of change is happening and lot of organizations are involved to talk about this issue better, to train camps and camp leaders and their counselors to not create a pressured environment for camper — I think what the history shows is that this hookup culture did not come about out of nowhere. It was partly related to the broader changes in America and the sexual revolution.
But it was also partly created because camps really needed to have campers’ buy-in, in order to be “successful.” A huge argument of my book is that we think about the power of camps as if camp directors have campers as, like, puppets on strings, and that what they do is what happens in camp life. But actually, campers have changed the everyday texture of life at camp over the course of the decades in so many different ways by resisting various ideas or just not being interested.
So hookup culture is also part of making campers feel like they have freedom at camp and that’s essential. That’s not a side project — that is essential to their ability to get campers to come back. It’s a financial need, and it’s an ideological need. If you make campers feel like they have freedom, then they will feel like they freely took on the ideologies your camp is promoting in a really natural way.
The last part of it is rising rates of intermarriage. As rates of intermarriage rose in the second half of the 20th century, there’s no doubt in my mind from doing the research that the preexisting culture around sexuality at camp and romance at camp got turbo-boosted [to facilitate relationships that could potentially lead to marriage between two Jews]. At that point, the allowance and control that camp leaders were trying to create for many decades leans maybe more heavily towards allowance.
There are positives to camp environments being a place where campers can explore their sexualities. There’s definitely a lot of conversation about the negative effects and those are all very, very real. I know people who went through horrible things at a camp and I also know people who experienced it as a very sex-positive atmosphere. I know people in my age range who were able to discover that they were gay or lesbian at camp in safety in comparison to home, so it’s not black and white at all. I hope that my chapter on romance and sexuality can maybe add some historical nuance to the conversation and give people a sense of how this actually happened. Because it happened for a whole bunch of reasons.
I think there’s a consensus view that camp is one of the most “successful” things the Jews do. But it’s hard to see where lessons from camp or camp culture are being imported to the rest of Jewish life. I’m curious what you see as kind of the lessons that Jewish institutions or Jewish communities have taken from camp — or have they not done that?
Every single public engagement I do about my work has boiled down to the question of, well, does it work? Does camp work? Is it successful? And that’s been a question that a lot of social scientists have been interested in. I don’t want to oversimplify that research, but a lot of the ways that they’ve measured success have been things that are not necessarily a given to all Jews as obviously the right way to be a Jew. So, for instance, in the ’90s and early 2000s, at the very least, a lot of research was about how, you know, “XYZ” camp and youth movement were successfully curbing intermarriage. A lot of them also asked campers and former campers how they feel about Israel, and it’s always if they are supportive of Israel in very normative ways, right, giving money visiting, supporting Israel or lobbying for its behalf — then camps have been successful.
I’m not interested in whether camps were successful by those metrics. I’m interested in how we got to the idea that camp should be successful in those ways in the first place. How did we get to those kinds of normative assumptions of like, this is a good Jew; a good Jew marries a Jew; a good Jew supports Israel, no matter what. So what I wanted to do is zoom out from that question of success and show how camp actually functions.
And then the question of “does it work” is really up to the reader. To people who believe that curbing intermarriage is the most important thing, then camps have been somewhat successful in the sense that people who go to these heavily educational camps are less likely to marry out of the faith.
But I am more interested in what actually happened at camp. And in terms of their legacies, I wanted to show how they changed various aspects of American Jewish life, and religion and politics. So I was really able to find how camping was essential in making kind of an Israel-centered Jewish education the norm. I was also able to draw a line between these Yiddish camps over the ’60s and ’70s that closed in the ’80s and contemporary Yiddish. The question of success is a real tricky and political one in a way that a lot of people have not talked about.
And is camp also fun? Because you’re creating a camp experience for your book launch next week.
Camp is fun — for a lot of people. Camp was not fun for everyone. And so I do want to play with that ambivalence at the party, and acknowledge that and also acknowledge that some people loved camp when they were younger and have mixed feelings about it now.
The party is not really a celebration of Jewish summer camp. People will be drinking and having fun and dancing — but I want them to be thinking while also about what is going on and why. How is Tisha B’Av [the fast day that commemorates the destruction of the ancient Jewish temple in Jerusalem that falls at the height of summer] commemorated at camp, for example?
Or what songs are we singing and what do they mean? I think a lot of people when they’re little kids, they learn songs in these Jewish summer camps that they can’t understand and later they maybe learn Hebrew and go, whoa, we were singing what?! My example from Zionist summer camp is singing “Ein Li Eretz Acheret,” or “I Have No Other Country.” We were in America and we obviously have another country! I don’t think anyone in my youth movement actually believes the words “Ein Li Eretz Acheret” because we live in America and people tend to kind of like living in America and most of them do not move to Israel.
So at the party we’ll be working through the fun of it, and at the same time the confusion of it and the ambivalence of it. I want it to be fun, and I also want it to be something that causes people to think.
—
The post American Jews created historic summer camps. Or did summer camps create American Jews? appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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In the Southwest, public libraries are becoming Yiddish hubs
Think of Yiddish today and you might picture Hasidic Brooklyn, Haredi neighborhoods in Israel or scholars working to preserve a language too often falsely written off as “dead” or “dying.”
But Texas? Ikh ken es nisht gleybn! (I can’t believe it!)
Sebastian Shulman, director of partnerships at the Yiddish Book Center, has spent the past year traveling around the U.S. and working with communities interested in Yiddish. Through the program, public libraries establish reading groups focused on English translations of Yiddish literature. Libraries in small towns across the Southwest, the Deep South and rural Michigan and Illinois have participated.
In Dallas, one library organized a daylong Yiddish festival that drew more than 500 people.
In Austin, Shulman gave a talk about Yiddish history during the city’s huge annual event, South by Southwest. The room for his lecture filled up, in spite of having to compete with the popular festival.
“There were young people and old people and Jewish people and non-Jewish people,” Shulman said. “It was such a deep hunger and a deep interest.”
At the end of the talk, a young Indigenous woman approached him and described similarities she saw between Yiddish and the culture and storytelling tradition of her own Cherokee Native American Nation. He was moved by the encounter, which served as a testament to the bridges forged by Yiddish literature and history.
“Yiddish kind of blows apart the concept of the unexpected place,” Shulman said, calling it “a language of everywhere and nowhere, all at the same time.”
In a Santa Fe, New Mexico public library, Yiddish literature and history is preserved by those who didn’t necessarily inherit the language from their grandparents. Many of them aren’t even Jewish and encountered it for the first time in libraries, archives, classrooms, festivals and books.
Yiddish culture in New Mexico got even more of a boost last year when Jordan Wax, a Santa Fe-based composer and performer of Yiddish and New Mexican regional music, released an album of original secular Yiddish children’s songs.
Letters from history
David Katz, a longtime Texas resident who has spent years collecting and translating Yiddish archival material from the state, said he’s found a life-long mission of preserving not only the language and idioms – but also the human stories of Yiddish-speaking Jews who immigrated to towns across Texas.
Katz regularly receives requests from families around Texas, asking him to translate Yiddish letters and documents that are between 70 and 150 years old. He’s also assisted in translating materials donated to the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum. Some contain ordinary family news. Others document poverty, illness, migration and the desperate search by Jews in Europe for a way out, as antisemitism intensified in the 1930s.
One letter from Germany from the early 1930s particularly stayed with him. The family wrote to relatives who’d already resettled in the U.S. about trying to obtain a visa to settle elsewhere, debating whether Canada, the United States or somewhere in South America might be the best destination.
Katz found it distressing that the family who wrote the letter seemed, ironically, to be unaware of the dangers facing them under the Nazis.“They’re debating about which climate might be better,” Katz recalled. “From their standpoint, they don’t know how bad things are about to get; it’s tragic to read that history so intimately.”
For Katz, translating these letters creates a connection to their senders and recipients.
“You read them, and even though the letters are maybe 100 years old, 80 years old, they very much make an impression on you that this is very understandable or approachable, because it’s Jewish life, not that different from today,” he said.
But that preservation work is only part of the story.
Susan Bronson, president of the Yiddish Book Center, said the center has increasingly worked with public libraries and Jewish communities around the country, and was inspired by the cross-generational and interfaith excitement to engage with Yiddish.
Many people attending these programs don’t speak the language. But translated literature, music, theater and lectures can provide an entry point.
Bronson has seen this among younger people through the Yiddish Book Center’s Great Jewish Books program, which introduces high school students to Jewish literature, including Yiddish works. Some students have said the experience helped them feel closer to a grandparent or better understand their family’s background.
The Yiddish Book Center’s oral history work has found Yiddish speakers in places people don’t typically associate with the language, including towns across the South and among Jewish farmers in New Jersey.
“It’s unexpected only because our perception of Yiddish became, in some ways, so narrow, but reality is more complicated and this narrow image obscures the breadth of Jewish life in America,” Bronson said.
Back in Texas, Katz is excited about the future possibility for Yiddish in the state, in the form of thousands of letters that remain untranslated and the old Texas Yiddish newspapers sitting on microfilm at university libraries.
“There are stories still waiting to be read,” he said, building on the state’s rich history.
Jewish immigrants spoke mame-loshen in homes and synagogues in Galveston, Dallas and San Antonio. They published newspapers in it, built community institutions around it and gathered to hear visiting writers and Jewish leaders speak the language.
In 1921, the Russian-born Yiddish literary critic Shmuel Niger traveled to Dallas and delivered a lecture in Yiddish to hundreds of people. A few years earlier, David Grün — better known as David Ben-Gurion, the future first prime minister of Israel — visited San Antonio, Texas twice where he addressed a packed room in Yiddish. He was meeting members of the Texas Labor Zionist chapter of Poale Zion (the Socialist Zionist movement), advocating for a sovereign Jewish state and raising money for Jewish immigrants to settle in Eretz Yisroel (The Land of Israel),
A lesser known historic Jewish community, deep in the “Bible Belt”, Waco, Texas had its first Jewish immigrants arrive in the mid-19th century. The first wave was Sepahardic, the second — Ashenazi. They built an Orthodox synagogue and later established an active chapter of the Jewish Workmen’s Circle, holding meetings in Yiddish.
A century after Ben-Gurion addressed Texan Jews in Yiddish, the language is still moving through the state — and far beyond it— not simply as a relic, but as a phenomenon people can continue to discover.
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These college students have favorable views of Israel. They also think it’s committing genocide.
A quarter of college students who view Israel favorably also believe its government is committing genocide.
That’s according to a Brandeis study published earlier this month, which surveyed nearly 4,000 students across 303 colleges in fall 2025 about their views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and concluded views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are more nuanced than often portrayed.
So how do students reconcile those views?
Researchers can’t say for sure, but one possibility is that students are distinguishing between supporting Israel’s existence and the actions of its current government.
The fact that many of the same students who say Israel is committing genocide also affirm its right to exist is not a contradiction, according to the Nexus Project, a watchdog group that works to combat antisemitism and protect open debate. In an Instagram post referring to the Brandeis study, the group lauded the nuance of the report.
“Collapsing both views into a single all-encompassing camp of ‘anti-Israel sentiment’ erases the gray area where most students actually live,” the post said.
Another explanation, the study says, is that the “genocide” label has less to do with actual views on Israel than political affiliation. Respondents who identified as liberal were much more likely to agree that Israel was committing genocide than those who identified as moderate or conservative. In fact, political ideology was a better predictor of whether someone said Israel was committing genocide than their stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict itself, the study found.
Overall, condemnation of Israel’s actions in Gaza is the more popular position on campus. Close to three-quarters of all students agreed with the statement that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians.
Students may also have different interpretations of the term “genocide,” said Graham Wright, first author on the study and an associate research scientist at Brandeis.
“It’s possible that some of them think, ‘I do generally support the Israeli government, but I don’t like some of the things they’re doing,’” Wright said. “The word genocide is just a stand-in for, ‘I don’t think they’re doing a good thing.’”
The very word genocide has also been a subject of debate.
Some Jewish groups, such as the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, have argued genocide is an accurate term to describe what they see as the deliberate destruction of Palestinian society.
Meanwhile, many pro-Israel advocates loathe the word genocide, legally defined as the intentional destruction of any national, racial, ethnic, or religious group, to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza following Oct. 7, 2023. They argue that Israel is seeking the destruction of Hamas, a terror group that states its intent to destroy the Jewish state.
Here are two other key takeaways from the study.
1. Most students differentiate between governments and their citizens — but not all
The study divided students into four groups based on their stances on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The largest group, 49% of students, supported civilians on both sides of the conflict.
Those students viewed both the Israeli and Palestinian people positively, while they expressed disdain toward the Israeli government, Hamas and the Palestinian Authority.
“This suggests that most people are able to make that distinction and have fairly nuanced views about a lot of these conflicts,” Wright said.
The vast majority of students, 85% of those surveyed, had unfavorable views of the Israeli government. But those views did not always extend to hostility toward the Israeli people. Students were split about half and half between favorable and unfavorable views of Israeli citizens.
Out of the 20% of students who held strong anti-Israel views — meaning they were likely to view both the Israeli government and its people unfavorably — half also viewed Hamas favorably.
“Certainly, I think that’s concerning,” Wright said. “You have a relatively small number of students who have very extreme views on Jews in Israel, and that seems to be contributing to a lot of the hostility that Jewish students are experiencing.”
Those students may make headlines, Wright said, but most undergraduates aren’t thinking about Israel day-to-day. In fact, 56% of surveyed students said they had low knowledge about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the topic was of low to moderate personal importance to them.
2. Jewish students have diverse views on the conflict, but they were also more likely to view Israel favorably than their non-Jewish peers
The survey included responses from 743 Jewish students. About 29% of those respondents viewed Israel favorably, the largest share of any ethno-religious identity surveyed.
That higher support for Israel among Jewish students held across political divides. Both politically liberal and politically conservative Jews were less likely to hold anti-Israel views than their non-Jewish peers, the study found.
The largest proportion of Jewish students, 56%, were “civilian sympathizers” — the group that views both Israeli and Palestinian civilians favorably while disliking both governments.
A minority of Jewish students, 9%, held unfavorable views of both the Israeli government and its people and favorable views of Palestinians.
Overall, the results show subtleties in how college students view the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that the media rarely captures, Wright said. “You only detect the nuance if you ask about it specifically.”
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In a forest where Jews fought the Nazis, a German military base and Lithuanian politics encroach on memory
(JTA) — Rūdninkai, LITHUANIA — Deep in the trees and swampy thickets of Lithuania’s Rūdninkai Forest, a series of makeshift forts is sinking into the earth.
These represent the remains of underground bunkers where Jewish partisans resisted their annihilation in the Holocaust. Under German occupation, some 400 Jews escaped the Vilnius ghetto to this forest and organized attacks against the Nazis.
After World War II, the story of these partisans was folded into Soviet propaganda, leaving a shroud of mystery over the bunkers. Now, construction of a new German military base in the area is throwing into question the fate of the forts — and the memory of their fighters.
Jewish former partisans and their descendants have traveled for decades to visit the bunkers, which mark the only memorial to their resistance in Lithuania. But in recent months, new obstacles have appeared: Signs forbidding entry and demarcating a “dangerous area” are installed on the road to the forest and pinned on trees approaching the forts.
Lithuania is nearing the final stage of constructing a military base for German troops in Rūdninkai Forest, nestled about 27 miles south of Vilnius. The training ground near the former partisan camps was planned after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine to shore up NATO’s eastern flank. Strategically located some 12 miles from the border with Moscow-allied Belarus and east of Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave, the troops will be Germany’s first permanent deployment abroad since World War II. About 5,000 German soldiers will begin arriving this fall.
“You cannot easily find the forts, so those who know how to get there, we just go,” Aušra Mikulskienė, a Jewish history tour guide from Vilnius, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “But now, there are ‘don’t enter’ stickers and stop signs. It’s becoming impossible to get there because they are closing all of the forest.”
Mikulskienė has brought the children and grandchildren of Jewish partisans to Rūdninkai for 10 years. They need her guidance to find eight standing forts, covered in logs and soil, which are not marked on maps and GPS systems. In such remote corners of the forest, partisans planned to ambush their enemies, lay explosives on German trains and equipment and sabotage telephone lines and infrastructure in Vilnius.
The bunkers are not protected by the Lithuanian government as cultural heritage sites, and they have deteriorated over years of neglect. But as the German base is completed and military training begins, Mikulskienė worries that prohibitory signs related to construction will turn into more serious barriers to the forts, and visitors could lose access altogether.
Twists of history over decades plunged the forts into obscurity. Lithuania was occupied from 1944 to 1990 by the Soviet Union, which honored hundreds of Soviet partisans who went to Rūdninkai Forest to battle the Germans. The Jewish partisans who joined them, and who helped Russian forces liberate Vilnius from the Nazis in 1944, were not part of this narrative.
The Lithuanian Soviet Republic, or Lithuanian SSR, began to commemorate Soviet partisans on the site of the Rūdninkai forts in the 1970s. Soviet and Jewish fighters only had access to wood and soil to build their bunkers. But the forts standing today are reinforced with concrete, an indication that the Soviet government fortified the structures to serve as memorials, said Mikulskienė. She remembers visiting the site on a school trip in the 1980s and listening to lessons about how the forebears of Soviet citizens resisted the fascists.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union, researchers have debated how much of the structures is original, and how much was reconstructed by the Soviet government for propaganda purposes. The first sign memorializing Jews was installed in the area by Bildungswerk Stanisław Hantz, a German educational group, in 2024. A small silver plaque reads, “In memory of the Jewish partisans who fought out of these forests against the Nazi occupiers and their helpers.”
The legacy of the forts — and the memory of Jewish partisans — is now mired in Lithuania’s repudiation of its Soviet past. Thousands of Lithuanian intellectuals, dissidents and other citizens were arrested, deported to Gulags and executed under Soviet rule. Once Lithuania gained independence in 1990, the stench of Soviet repression overpowered that of the Nazi occupation for many Lithuanians.
Lithuania was for centuries a center of rich Jewish thought, religious life and secular culture; Vilna, as the capital was known in Yiddish, was nicknamed the “Jerusalem of the North.” But after more than 90% of Lithuanian Jews were killed by the Nazis and their collaborators, few remained to commemorate the Holocaust.
“The collective memory of Lithuanians basically sees only one occupation: the Soviet occupation,” said Ilya Lempertas, a researcher and editor of books on the Holocaust in Lithuania. “Soviet partisans, in Lithuanian memory, are those who deported Lithuanians to Siberia.”
That means the Jewish partisans of Rūdninkai Forest are often viewed not as heroes, but as traitors, according to Mikulskienė. “They are not considered as fighting against Nazis, these Jews,” she said. “They are considered to be fighting with the Soviets.”
Fania Brantsovsky, the last living Jewish resistance fighter of Rūdninkai Forest, died in 2024 at 102. She joined a Jewish partisan unit under the command of the writer Abba Kovner, known as the Nokmim, or Avengers. On Sept. 23, 1943, the same night she was smuggled out of the Vilnius ghetto, the Nazis began their final liquidation of the ghetto. None of her family survived.
Brantsovsky led tours to the forest bunkers in the 2000s. Until her death, she advocated for the structures to be preserved and protected as a site of learning about the Jewish partisans’ struggle.
Dovid Katz, a Brooklyn-born, Vilnius-based scholar of Yiddish and the Holocaust who runs the online journal “Defending History,” was a friend of Brantsovsky’s. “Her one last request was, ‘Dovid, please, never stop reminding Jews around the world to speak up for the existence of the forts,’” said Katz. “‘Let our grandchildren be able to come to this place in the forest and see wooden forts in the ground, which were the only postwar physical remnant of Jewish resistance.’”
Germany’s federal government has signaled that it will not disturb the site. In response to a parliamentary inquiry, the Bundestag announced in July that it was “committed to preserving the former World War II partisan camp in Rūdninkai Forest, located on the training grounds of Panzer Brigade 45 stationed in Lithuania, as a place of learning and remembrance.”
The government added that the former partisan bunkers were not part of Germany’s training facilities and would not be affected by construction, but it was in Lithuania’s hands to manage the site’s preservation and access.
“The Lithuanian government has been asked to examine whether the area in question merits protection and to take this into account in further planning,” said the Bundestag.
Lithuania’s Ministry of Culture told JTA that the bunkers do not have protected status as cultural heritage sites because they “are not authentic and are not located at their original sites.” Instead of being linked to Jewish fighters, the ministry said the forts were “associated with Soviet partisans.”
“During the Soviet era, they were included in the list of historical monuments of the Lithuanian SSR, while a significant proportion of such ‘monuments’ were intended to reinforce Soviet ideology and historical narratives,” the ministry said in a statement.
The area will be maintained in the future with an information board installed nearby, according to the ministry, which said the content of that information has yet to be decided. Visiting the forts won’t be prohibited altogether, but those who wish to go will have to comply with military rules and obtain advance approval from the Rūdninkai Training Area Command, the ministry said.
Katz believes nationalist factions in the Lithuanian government are revising the history of a site that hosts genuine remnants of Jewish bunkers. He views the government’s resistance to protecting the site as an outgrowth of the “double genocide” theory, a nationalist narrative that emerged in Lithuania after the fall of the Soviet Union. This theory equates World War II atrocities committed by the Soviets, who occupied Lithuania in 1940-1941 following a non-aggression pact between Stalin and Hitler, with those of the Nazis, who took control after Hitler broke the agreement and invaded the Soviet Union. (The Soviets reoccupied Lithuania in 1944.)
In this framework, the Soviets committed genocide against Lithuanians through mass deportations — with the complicity, some add, of Jewish communists — and only afterwards came the killing of Jews by the Nazis and their Lithuanian collaborators.
“The Soviets and their Jewish friends, as the narrative has it, committed the first genocide, and then came the reaction, the tragic second genocide,” which was the Holocaust, said Katz.
The equating of Soviet deportations with the Holocaust has been widely rejected by international scholars and Jewish institutions. The Soviet regime deported some 17,500 Lithuanians in 1941 to remote parts of Siberia and northern Russia. While individual Lithuanian Jews served in the Soviet administration, Jews were also disproportionately targeted in the deportations.
Lempertas, who like Katz is Jewish, does not believe the forts standing in Rūdninkai Forest include genuine remains of Jewish partisan bunkers. He supports the government’s view that the structures were built entirely as Soviet propaganda — but even so, he believes they should be protected.
“It has to be saved, from my point of view, for those who are coming there because of family,” said Lempertas. “It serves as an exhibition.”
Mikulskienė said the forts are deeply important to the families of Jewish fighters. She watches visitors stand before them, recite memories of war and sing partisan songs passed down through generations.
Yet in recent years, as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sparked security threats and surging anti-Russian sentiment in Lithuania, Mikulskienė has found it increasingly difficult to advocate for the memory of Jews who fought alongside Soviets.
“You are seen as a follower of Soviet propaganda, and also now Putin’s propaganda,” she said. “That’s a bit dangerous, being this person in Lithuania.”
Anna Avidan, who was born in Vilnius to Holocaust survivors and founded the Jewish history nonprofit Jerusalem of the North, said the bunkers should be treated as a memorial site with educational opportunities.
“There is a strong stereotype here that Jews were communists and they deserved the killings — this simplified worldview,” she said. Dispelling such stereotypes “is a good case for explaining why it has to be commemorated.”
One the eve of World War II, about 4 in 10 people in Vilnius were Jewish. But decades after the end of the Soviet Union, Avidan said the city has yet to fully recognize the Jewish world that vanished from Lithuania’s cities, towns and forests.
“Lithuania has been independent for more than 35 years already,” said Avidan. “Still, we have no clear memorial in this city to the victims of the Holocaust, and for me, that’s a message.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post In a forest where Jews fought the Nazis, a German military base and Lithuanian politics encroach on memory appeared first on The Forward.
