That's seriously creepy.
https://twitter.com/yiddishnews/status/1320351172813852672
Ok a lot of people are asking me why I think this is creepy. Here's why.
In traditional Ashkenazi Judaism, Vilnius was the primary center of learning--like some kind of mixture of Oxford and Cambridge MA.
The influence is so profound and so historically resonant that to this day, the main strain of non-hasidic ultra-Orthodoxy is known as "Lithuanian."
That community was wiped from the face of the Earth.
This was not the fault of the Lithuanian state, to be sure, any more than the Holocaust in Poland was the fault of the Polish state.
But to issue a coin on the birth of the Vilna Gaon feels to me a bit--off. I can't think of a good analogy for it it, to be honest, and I honor the intentions behind it. Really. I'm sure it was well meant. But it creeps me out.
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