Vilnius
A city of some 600,000, Vilnius has a beautiful core neighborhood consisting of many restored buildings from the 16th and 17th centuries, including many churches and the oldest university in Eastern Europe, dating back to 1579. The whole city can be viewed from the roof of Gediminas tower, part of a castle that was one of the earliest Gothic structures, and this is captured by the first and second pictures. The third picture shows the Presidential palace. The fourth picture includes a sign that Marc Porzecanski found funny showing how to park vehicles in the narrow streets – namely, partly on the sidewalk. The fourth and final pictures are of the Torat Hakodesh Synagogue, the only one to have survived the 1940s because the Nazis used it to store medical supplies. Built in 1903, it a rather grand, modern-looking synagogue with a reproduction of the tablets with the Ten Commandments on its roof and the inscription “A house of prayer is a holy place for all peoples” in Hebrew above the entrance. Lithuania’s official website for tourists is http://www.tourism.lt/ and the one for Vilnius is http://www.vilnius.lt/tourism/. For a virtual tour of Jewish Vilnius and background on Lithuanian Jewry one may consult http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/vjw/Vilnius.html; http://www.shtetlinks.jewishgen.org/lithuania.html; and http://www.jewishartnetwork.com/JewishArt/vilna_gaon.asp.
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