On a Sunday morning in late November, around 250 people fill the dark brown wooden pews of the Vilna Shul in Boston. A synagogue built by Jewish immigrants from Lithuania in 1919 on Phillips Street in the central Beacon Hill neighborhood, it closed in 1985, and then reopened as a cultural center in the early 1990s. With its wooden floors, narrow ceilings on the first floor, and partly recovered murals and stained-glass windows in the sanctuary on the second floor, the building feels old, and full of history. But today, there’s a touch of summer camp.
Every person is wearing a white nametag. Some carry large white signs with surnames on them: Flink, Goldstein, White. Marilyn Okonow, a slight woman with dark curls tinged with grey, is standing on the central bimah, and calls out the family names on the nametags. Members of the audience cheer.
What’s happening here? On the surface, it is a very well-executed event that connects people to the Vilna Shul while preparing for a capital campaign to complete the renovation of the building in time for the 2019 centennial. What the people munching on bagels and fruits have in common is that their ancestors were founding members of this Orthodox congregation. Names of those members appeared on one of four plaques, which were the only surviving record of the early members. Okonow and David Rosen, both of whom are board members and genealogists, teamed up to painstakingly research about 60 of the more than 400 names — and brought around 350 people to two Descendants’ Day events. (The first took place in November 2013, the second one year later.)
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