Jews of Punskas

The article is dedicated to the Year of Lithuanian Jewish History announced by the Lithuanian Seimas in 2020. With this decision, the Parliament of the Republic of Lithuania wanted to commemorate the 300th anniversary of the birth of the rabbi, the leader of the Litvak religious thought, Vilnius Gaonas Elijas Ben Saliamonas Zalmanas. The history of Lithuanian Jews is a part of Lithuanian history. They significantly contributed to the development of Lithuanian statehood, history, culture, and science. We know relatively little about the Jews of Punskas, their history is almost unexplored. There are no living witnesses, written sources are scattered in various places. A number of documents that may have contained information about the life of the Jews of Punskas were lost, destroyed, burned during the fires in Punskas, and looted by the occupiers. Some hints about the Jews of Punskas can be found in Jonas Totoraitis’ book History of Sūduva Suvalkija and Geographical Dictionary of the Kingdom of Poland (Słownik geograficzny Królestwa Polskiego). Few Jewish-built houses survived in Punskas. They can be identified by the door frame to which the mezuzah was attached. There is still a rabbi’s house in the centre of Punskas, a half-burnt synagogue, and on the outskirts of the town there is a Jewish cemetery with several tombstones that have survived there. The article mentions when Jews started settling in Punskas (according to people’s stories, they celebrated the 300th anniversary of their establishment in 1929), describes the relations between Jews and Lithuanians in Punskas, people’s memories of the town’s Jews in the interwar period, their synagogue, holidays, weddings, and funerals. Much attention is paid to the fire in Punskas, and the fate of the Jews during the Second World War