Vilna ווילנא
The «Jerusalem of Lithuania»: city of the Vilna Gaon, capital of the mitnagdim and home of the Talmud presses.
Vilna was called the Jerusalem of Lithuania, and it was no exaggeration: dozens of synagogues and study houses, great libraries, and the Romm press, whose Talmud edition (5646–5657) became the standard still learned from today.
Its central figure is Rabbi Eliyahu ben Shlomo Zalman, the Vilna Gaon (5480–5557). He held no office, studied alone, corrected talmudic texts, and wrote across every field from halacha and kabbalah to grammar and mathematics, demanding precision in all of it. He led the opposition to hasidism, and Vilna became the capital of the mitnagdim. His disciple Rabbi Chaim of Volozhin founded the yeshiva from which the whole Lithuanian system grew.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Vilna was also a centre of Haskalah, Yiddish and publishing. In 5701 all of it was destroyed.