COLUMN ONE : No Jewish Revival for Lithuania : Today’s community is a tiny remnant of a once-vibrant 250,000. And independence, coupled with memories of the local role in the Holocaust, is spurring those left to leave.

With its peaked roof and tiny, overgrown garden, the synagogue on Pylimo Street was never the most fashionable in the city or the richest or most learned. Today its claim to importance is that it is the only one left in town.

Even so, it is not easy to fill. Many are the Sabbaths on which services cannot be held for want of a minyan, the minimum 10 adult men necessary for organized prayer.

Last Saturday, 13 men turned out, although there was no rabbi and no women. Only two of the worshipers were under 60; most of the rest were well over 70. In a scene more like the stop-and-start rhythm of a Quaker meeting than the concentrated celebration of the Jewish God, the worshipers milled about and only occasionally joined in murmured prayer.

Now that half a century of Soviet domination has ended with Moscow’s recognition of their country’s independence, Lithuanians can expect the revival of many things, from political liberty to private enterprise.

Jewish culture is not among them.

While the rest of Lithuania erupts in renewed nationalism, the Jews of this city, once labeled the “Jerusalem of Lithuania,” are contemplating the final days of a culture that was crippled by Adolf Hitler, whose forces annihilated 94% of the Jewish population, and by 20 subsequent years of enforced Soviet atheism.

“The Jewish culture could not ever have been rebuilt,” said Samuel Levin, the former director of the city’s Jewish school, speaking the evening before he departed for permanent residence in Israel. “It’s dead, and what we’re doing is trying to resuscitate a dead organism.”

Once a vibrant nation-within-a-nation of 250,000 people, the Jewish community in Lithuania now numbers about 7,000. Even that figure is misleading. It mostly counts not Lithuanian Jews but Russians who temporarily settled here because it was easier to emigrate to Israel from the Baltic region than from Russia or the Ukraine.

Rather than stirring enthusiasm to build upon a great tradition, Lithuanian independence will only inspire most of the remaining Jewish community to leave, according to community leaders.

This reflects the enduring trauma of Lithuania’s role in the Holocaust, when Jews were assaulted not only by the Nazis but by their own countrymen, even their fellow townspeople. Lithuanian attacks on local Jews began in 1939, well before Nazi units entered the country. To the survivors, this made the Lithuanians even worse than the Germans, who at least were strangers.

“You would not believe that someone who was your friend, with whom you studied at school, would be your murderer,” said one elderly woman who asked that her name not be published. “At the beginning of the war, before the Germans even came, the Lithuanians started killing.”

Those who survived retain a permanent idea of the Lithuanians’ latent potential for anti-Semitism.

“We are a hungry country; we have many problems,” said Rachel Kostanian, curator of the Jewish State Museum, which occupies a modest wooden house tucked away on a quiet side street in downtown Vilnius. “The Jews here are afraid that people will search for the guilty, and our heritage tells us that we are always the guilty.”

This mistrust of Lithuanians is underscored by the new government’s rehabilitation of deportees who had been charged by the Soviets with wartime crimes. Many in the Jewish community believe that the program will, deliberately or not, exonerate hundreds of genocidal murderers.

“With these rehabilitations they have killed all the remaining Jewish illusion in Lithuania,” said a prominent Jewish lawyer in Vilnius. “How can we forget and how can we forgive?”

Accordingly, every liberalization of emigration laws has been accompanied by a rush of Lithuanian Jews to Israel. From 1970 to 1975, for instance, 25,000 of the 30,000 Jews then living here emigrated. Last year 2,500 departed.

“As soon as the gate opened, wave after wave left,” said Levin, who made a career as a university administrator in Vilnius before opening the Jewish school last year.

With independence, most of the vestigial community is leaving or thinking about leaving. The Jewish school, opened with the Israeli government’s assistance, has enrolled a second-grade class of 200 children--but the curriculum of Hebrew language and Judaic studies is designed specifically to ease their transition to Israel.

“Essentially, these are people who have already decided to go to Israel,” said Josef Shuster, a Vilnius native who returned here last year after 22 years in Israel to be the local representative of the Jewish Agency, the semiofficial Israeli office that supervises immigration.

Shuster estimates that nearly two-thirds of Lithuania’s 7,000 Jewish residents will emigrate in the next two years, mostly to Israel.

Left behind will be only “the elderly, mixed marriages and some exceptions to the general rule,” he said. “That’s the way it always is with Jewish emigration.”

One such exception is Emanuelis Zingeris, a young Jewish historian with a care-worn look who is chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Lithuanian Parliament. Married to a Lithuanian, Zingeris often finds himself accused of being just short of a collaborator for joining the Lithuanian government and defending policies such as the rehabilitation.

Zingeris says he believes that Jews can have fulfilling lives in Lithuania, although he has never counseled others to stay.

“I’m convinced that Jews here will be normal citizens of Lithuania, with the same rights that Jews have in Denmark or anywhere else,” he said. “But over the years, I’ve become convinced that the children of my relatives in Israel have grown up as Jews in a way they could not do here.”

What will shortly be extinguished in Lithuania was once a cultural glory. Vilnius was the paramount Jewish cultural center of Europe, the home of the Yivo Institute, a center of Yiddish learning now headquartered in Israel, and the birthplace of such Jewish luminaries as violinist Jascha Heifetz and painter Jacques Lipschitz. Its main temple, destroyed during World War II, was so vast that its site now supports two apartment houses and a large park.

Now, at most Jewish institutions in the city, little of the feeling of glory remains. At the Jewish school, children run laughing along hallways decorated with grainy photographs of the Holocaust. The Jewish State Museum is also devoted to the catastrophe, its centerpiece a picture of a Jewish man clutching his child to his breast on the rim of a grave as a Lithuanian soldier levels a rifle at his head.

The Pylimo Street synagogue’s right chandelier and blue-and-white decor are overshadowed by the posters glued to every column: They are photographs of gravestones, taken from every Lithuanian community from which Jews have disappeared, all remembering victims of the “fascist terror.”

What drives people to memorialize the Holocaust is not a new surge of overt anti-Semitism--for such manifestations have been rare--but rather what seems to be Lithuania’s willing denial of the past.

In its post-independence fervor of nationalism, the Lithuanian press has run countless articles extolling the heroes of the anti-Soviet uprising of June, 1941--an event noted in the Jewish community chiefly for the slaughter of 6,000 Jews by many of the same partisans.

Lithuanians younger than 40 are almost entirely unaware of the dimensions of anti-Semitism here, of the repeated pogroms of the late 1930s and early 1940s and especially of the scale of Lithuanian collaboration with the Nazis.

In part this is the fault of the Soviets, whose numerous markers of mass-murder sites around the region identify most victims not as Jews but simply as “Soviet citizens.”

“What aches is not just anti-Semitism,” said Henry Agranovsky, 54, a retired historian, “but that the Jewish tragedy is silenced and minimized.”

As the Germans approached in June, 1941, and prepared to eject the Soviet army from Lithuanian territory, pogroms erupted in at least 40 localities. By late 1941, only 40,000 Jews remained alive in Lithuania.

Although many of those were subsequently deported to Stalinist labor camps, the bloodshed eased when the Soviet army regained the country in 1944. The tendency of many Jews to regard the Soviets as their deliverers contributes to the gulf between them and the mostly Roman Catholic Lithuanians, who despise the Soviets as occupiers and colonists.

“My father and mother would not be alive today if the Soviet army had not liberated them,” said Faina Kuklanskeita, a Jewish lawyer in Vilnius. “So their view of the Soviet army is not so bad.”

But in fact, Lithuania has not been an easy place for the Jewish community no matter who was in control. After the Nazi slaughter, more Jewish than non-Jewish residents were nationalized by the new Soviet regime. For 20 years after the war, the Soviets forbade formal observance of Judaism.

“Until 1967,” recalled Shuster, who grew up in Lithuania during that time, “the slightest impulse to study language and tradition was suppressed. Everything was underground.”

Meanwhile, the Lithuanians themselves seemed always to view the Jews as a race apart.

“The greatest compliment I ever heard would be, ‘Even though you’re a Jew, you’re a decent woman,’ ” recalled Rachel Margolis, 70, who has always lived in Vilnius.

She recalls life in the Vilnius ghetto: how the shingles of her father’s house were constantly defaced, how she managed to earn a biology degree from the university but was prevented from getting a doctorate. She got a teaching job because the head of personnel at the university was Jewish. But when a Lithuanian replaced him, she said, “no more Jews got jobs.”

“You could count on your fingers the people who would help Jews,” she said.

So today the Jewish community is well below the critical mass necessary for cultural and spiritual renewal. Younger families find the religious and social life of Lithuanian Judaism limited and sterile.

“We don’t have many Jewish friends because there are so few Jews,” said Michael Himmelstein, 41, an architect with a teen-age son and daughter.

It is for their children that most Lithuanian Jews say they are emigrating. Many will sacrifice professional careers to live in a country whose shaky economy may make their skills superfluous.

“The self-image of Jews in Lithuania,” said Levin, the school director, “is of rockets burning themselves out to bring their satellites--their children--to Israel.”

One such is Ilya Bereznickas, an artist whose colorful caricatures and animated films have delighted Lithuanian children and adults alike for years. Bereznickas is soon to depart for what he says is a four-year sojourn in Israel, but most of his acquaintances believe he will never come back.

“It’s a burden weighing on all of us here, to go or not to go,” he said. “If I don’t go now, my child will inherit the same burden. The question has to be finally solved, or one has to change one’s skin and become somebody else. The problem is either to be a Jew and have the problem with you forever, or assimilate.”

Like many Jewish professionals, he finds the idea of re-establishing a career in Israel daunting. “When I say my name in Lithuania, everybody knows it,” he said. “It won’t be the same in Israel.”

That sentiment is echoed by Kuklanskeita, who fears that her legal training will be useless in a country where she speaks little of the language and knows none of the law.

“I think I’ll be very poor there,” she said. “But I think my children will be happy.”