Bagel shop, Vilnius, 1910, by Mstislav Dobuzhinsky.
A new kosher café in Vilnius, Lithuania, had its grand opening Thursday with an overflow crowd spilling into the street.
The Bagel Shop café is housed on the first floor of the Lithuanian Jewish Community, which some visitors still refer to as the Kahilla, in a mostly neglected and empty cafeteria hall.
Guests and LJC staff began filtering in well before the scheduled 3 P.M. start and four cheerful women behind the counter began placing bagel sandwiches cut into quarters on plates on the café’s six small tables.
LJC chairwoman Faina Kukliansky addressed the small packed room and said the Bagel Shop Café is an important part of the Bagel Shop tolerance program the LJC has been carrying out for the last year or so with funding from Norway and the EEA Grants program. She said the project was supposed to end earlier but had been continued into the next year.
Vilnius’s new rabbi Shimson Daniel Izakson blessed a mezuzah, or Jewish luck charm, hung on the front entrance and spoke briefly in Hebrew, expressing his hopes to rekindle a somewhat lagging religious community which managed to survive the Holocaust and Soviet rule in Lithuania to the present time.
Bagel Shop tolerance program coördinator Indrė Rutkauskaitė briefly welcomed the guests which included numerous members of the Lithuanian Jewish Community, many local non-Jews, a contingent of reporters and photographers from the Lithuanian media and even a famous Lithuanian comedian.
According to an earlier press release posted by the LJC, the Bagel Shop will serve kosher food exclusively, with rabbinical supervision of all food preparation. The enterprise is extremely small: the café proper about the size of a large cloakroom, the counter with foods on display, and the bagel-making counter behind another wall, consisting of an oven, a hot plate for dipping the bagels at the dough stage into boiling water and a small refrigeration device.
The history of kosher restaurants in contemporary Vilnius is not a happy one. Where the Bagel Shop is now located housed a kosher restaurant called Kineret in the mid-90s. That restaurant was never open except for an occasional chartered wedding reception. It eventually moved into a larger space near the Conti Hotel–a favorite of Jewish and Israeli travellers–but then again reverted to an “opened by reservation only” modus operandi. Many foreign and local Jews complained the prices were much too high for casual dining anyway. Another kosher restaurant opened across the river more recently called Rishon, also reportedly too expensive for most locals, but serving very good, according to diners’ reports. Many visitors to the city who require kosher food used to go to a Lebanese diner, and after that closed a few years ago, they settled on a handful of Indian restaurants instead, one of them located in a yoga ashram in a hidden corner of the Vilnius Old Town.
According to sources within the LJC, the whole idea was to start out small and grow with demand. They divided the former cafeteria into a much smaller space for the new operation, even though there is a full kitchen in the section of the hall now behind the bagel shop. At the grand opening the song and dance ensemble Fayerlakh performed in that bigger hall, with some excellent and extremely schmaltzy although extremely tight and entertaining renditions of some old Jewish, but not necessarily Litvak, favorites. Presumably the larger space from the former cafeteria hall will remain a venue for performances associated with the Bagel Shop.
Currently the café is only serving bagels with three dips–khatsilim made from eggplant, humous and a cheese-and-olive spread–, bagel sandwiches with tomatoes and dips and coffee. The next stage is traditional Jewish sweets, including teyglakh, imberlakh and lekakh. They also plan to begin baking braided loaves of challa suitable for Sabbath. If demand allows, the café could begin making traditional hot Jewish dishes as well.
The LJC announced a public tender to find someone capable and experienced enough to make the café a success, and ended up hiring the ethnically Lithuanian Jurga Nagrockytė, who has her own successful restaurant operation. At least one of the women behind the counter is a member of the lcoal Jewish community, although her light skin, blue eyes and short-cropped blond hair might fool most tourists. The Jewish Community also made the decision to allow entry directly from the street rather than passing through the security gate and guard at the main entrance to the building, which will facilitate custom.
Although the grand opening was scheduled to run until 5 P.M. and there was no lack of free bagel sandwiches as well as red and white wine and even vodka, the crowd dispersed around 4:00, which perhaps bodes well for future turnover at the kosher establishment. The Fayerlakh ensemble found themselves performing to a mostly empty hall. Even so, there was a line of paying customers at the cash register, carrying away hot bagels in brown paper bags.
