Ground-penetrating radar has found what decades of assuming the Great Synagogue of Vilna was simply gone could not: the foundations were still there, under a school playground.
A centre worth naming a city after
Vilnius earned the nickname "Jerusalem of Lithuania" partly on the strength of its synagogue complex and its association with the Vilna Gaon, Elijah ben Solomon Zalman, an eighteenth century rabbinic authority whose rulings and scholarship carried enormous influence across much of the Jewish world well beyond the city itself.
Demolished twice, the second time deliberately
The synagogue was heavily damaged during the Nazi occupation and used degradingly as a stable, but its remaining ruins survived the war standing. Soviet authorities then chose to demolish what was left in the 1950s, in peacetime, and built a school on the site, an act of deliberate postwar erasure rather than wartime destruction.
Found again by digging carefully
Archaeological excavations beginning in the 2010s, using ground-penetrating radar alongside targeted digging, located and confirmed the synagogue's foundations and the remains of its central bimah beneath the modern schoolyard, allowing researchers to map the building's footprint even though nothing of it remains visible above ground, a rediscovery driven by patient archaeology rather than by any surviving structure to point to.