Papers of Khaykl Lunski

Khaykl Lunski was born on June 29, 1881 in Slonim, Russia (now Belarus). His father was a melamed and was descended from a rabbinical family from Koenigsberg. From a young age, Lunski received a traditional Jewish education, attending kheyder and then the yeshivas of Slonim and Lida. In 1892 he came to Vilna, where he spent two years as a shames in a small synagogue.

In 1895 Lunski began working for the Strashun Library. In addition to growing and managing the library's collection, Lunski served as a living catalogue for library patrons. He was renowned for his encyclopedic knowledge of the library's contents, and beloved for his kindness and humility. He remained at the Strashun Library until its liquidation by the Nazis in 1941. He was also active in Zionist and religious circles. In 1918, he assisted S. Ansky in establishing the Jewish Historical Ethnographic Society in Vilna and collected thousands of documents, books, pictures, pinkasim (record books of Jewish communities), and folklore materials for the Society and for its publications. He became secretary of the Jewish Historical Ethnographic Society in 1919 and was also an active member of the YIVO's bibliographic commission.

Lunski’s literary career began with Zionist poetry, which he published in Luah Eretz-Yisrael (Calendar of Israel) in 1905. In 1917 he produced Toldot hagaon hatsadik maran r’ mordekhai vaytsel, a biography of his (by then deceased) wife's grandfather. He began writing in Yiddish in the same year, with essays about Vilna in the anthologies Vilner zamlbukh and Pinkes. In subsequent years he published essays, articles, and books on the history of Vilna Jews during World War I, biographies of rabbis and religious scholars such as the Vilna Gaon, a memoir of S. Ansky, a catalogue of the Strashun Library, and several other works. He also collected thousands of books for the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Just prior to the Second World War, Lunski was in the process of writing a history of the Jewish community of Slonim. In all probability, this work was lost during the war.

During the Nazi occupation of Vilna, the Strashun Library and YIVO Library and Archives were liquidated. Lunski and other members of Vilna’s Jewish intelligentsia were forced, along with other Jews from the Vilna Ghetto, to work for the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, a Nazi unit involved in looting Jewish cultural property in the occupied countries. Lunski was made to sort, pack, and ship thousands of Jewish books and archival materials from the Strashun Library, mainly to the NSDAP Institut zur Erfoschung die Judenfrage in Frankfurt am Main. While in the Ghetto he wrote works about the gravestones in the old Jewish cemetery in Vilna and about Jewish publishing in Vilna. He also kept a ghetto diary. These works also appear to have been lost.

The information concerning Lunski’s death is contradictory. Shmerke Kaczerginski claimed that Lunski was deported to Treblinka together with his daughter Khana, while other accounts say that he was tortured and died in Vilna in September 1942.