The remarkable story of the Lost Shtetl Museum

Rainer Mahlamäki, the architect who designed the Lost Shtetl Museum, August 25, 2025 Photo by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett

By Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett September 3, 2025

Sign up for the Yiddish Brief, a bissel of all things Yiddish, brought to you weekly by our Forverts editor Rukhl Schaechter.

Šeduva, two hours by car from Vilnius, was once a shtetl. Not a single Jew remains, but a Jewish museum just opened. You may well wonder why, of all the former shtetls in Lithuania, create such a museum here?

The story begins with a cemetery. Sergey Kanovich, whose NGO (non-profit organization) Maceva had been documenting Jewish cemeteries in Lithuania since 2011, was asked by a Šeduva descendant to restore the Jewish cemetery of his ancestral town and create monuments at three mass killing sites in the nearby Liaudiškiai and Pakuteniai forests. That’s where Lithuanian collaborators killed Šeduva Jews under German orders in August 1941.

As the work on the Šeduva Jewish cemetery neared completion in 2015, Kanovich was worried that since “no one would be interested in the cemetery, it would be neglected.” He cast his eye on the empty field across the road and imagined a museum about the lives of Šeduva’s Jews. The museum would be “a guardian of the cemetery” and complete the story.

For centuries, Šeduva was a shtetl, a small market town with a large Jewish population. The shtetl was the most characteristic form of Jewish settlement in Eastern Europe, and there were about 200 of them in Lithuania. According to the 1897 census, Jews were two-thirds of Šeduva’s 3,000 inhabitants. Their numbers eventually dwindled due to deportations and emigration, mainly to South Africa and Palestine.

Kanovich founded the Lost Shtetl Museum, a private museum, which was underwritten by a descendant of Šeduva’s Jews, and served as its CEO for over a decade. In 2015, Kanovich invited me to join the project as an advisor. We worked hard to create a high quality team. Ralph Appelbaum Associates became the exhibition designer. I proposed to Kanovich that Rainer Mahlamäki, the architect for POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, design the building. Milda Jakulytė-Vasil, creator of the Holocaust Atlas of Lithuania at the Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum, became Chief Curator.

Kanovich recalled his first dinner with Mahlamäki. It was in Vilnius. During the meal, Rainer made a sketch on a paper napkin of his architectural concept. “The building that resulted captured perfectly the spirit of the story and the place,” Kanovich said. Surrounded by fields, the museum today evokes wooden shtetl architecture, not literally, but poetically, as a series of geometric volumes whose silvery surfaces shimmer in the light.

I have a warm place in my heart for small museums, and this is one of them, with a capacity of 170 visitors. I have always believed that the Lost Shtetl Museum would be a jewel. Like POLIN Museum, the Lost Shtetl Museum was created from the inside out. It began with the story, and the architecture developed hand in hand with the exhibition. At its heart are personal stories.

The exhibition focuses on everyday life during the interwar years and the fate of Šeduva’s Jews during the Holocaust. Kanovich wanted to “give the stage to ordinary people.” His own father, Grigory Kanovich, a celebrated Lithuanian Jewish writer, was the son of a tailor and grew up in a shtetl, Jonava, the setting for many of his novels. Kanovich believed that if the exhibition focused on a historical period closer in time to the present, within living memory, rather than to the distant past, visitors would relate more empathically to actual people.

The exhibition consists of nine galleries. As you walk in, you’re greeted by  a film recreating Šeduva as a shtetl, followed by a brief history of Lithuanian Jews. At the center of the spectacular “Market Square” gallery is a multimedia scale model of Šeduva. The surrounding “shop windows” present economic life, culture, coexistence, and conflict.

In the “Dreams and Realities” gallery, we meet Jewish teenagers of the 1930s. Their autobiographies, written for a competition organized by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, reveal their innermost thoughts and feelings. In the “People of the Book” gallery, a stunning Torah Ark made of layers of etched glass, takes inspiration from the Torah Ark of the wooden synagogue of the shtetl of Valkinik (Valkininkai), which was destroyed by the Germans in 1941.

The “Holocaust” gallery focuses on Šeduva within the wider Lithuanian context. A timeline meticulously reconstructs precisely what happened to the town’s Jews: who did what to whom, where, when, how, and even why. Local inhabitants involved in the mass murder often knew their victims personally and are identified here by name and photograph whenever possible. Although this information is a matter of public record, the subject is understandably sensitive because the perpetrators’ families still live in the town. We hear from Lithuanian eyewitnesses on camera and from survivors, some of whom lived to tell what happened thanks to neighbors who risked their lives to save them.

The museum also includes a memorial space and breathtaking “Canyon of Hope.” This soaring corridor, 68 feet high, leads to a massive window overlooking the cemetery. Buried there are Šeduva Jews who died a natural death, their graves marked by the stone witnesses to their lives.

The museum will open to the public on September 20, 2025, but without Kanovich, who stepped down in January 2025 because of a fundamental disagreement with the museum’s sponsor about the vision for the museum, and Jakulytė-Vasil, who left a month later for the same reason.

Despite their departure, the Lost Shtetl Museum has the potential to set a new standard for Jewish museums in Lithuania and for shtetl museums in Eastern Europe. Yes, there are other shtetl museums, in Chmielnik, Tykocin, and Płock, all of them in former synagogues with limited space and resources. To realize that potential, this jewel box must become a living museum, a trusted institution of public history, and space of informed dialogue and debate. For Kanovich, “The Lost Shtetl Museum must deserve to be a guardian of the cemetery. It must earn the respect of the dead.”