21st Century Bogatyr: June 2025

by Zvi Baranoff

Nes promoted the project of building the Holy Shtot of Vilna as a great spiritual mission. He talked about it to anyone that would listen. The idea, at first, garnered precious little enthusiasm on Planet Shney.

Most of the mentshen of Planet Shney considered the idea of building a shtot centered on a Grand Yeshiva in an uninhabited sector to be either foolhardy or an outright scam. Some suspected that Nes had slipped a gear. They began referring to him as Der Vilner Goen, the Genius of Vilna, in a most derogatory sarcastic manner, mostly behind his back.

Planet Shney, after all, had no networks of rabbinic dynasties or structures of bureaucracies that would willingly foster and possibly benefit from institutions such as a yeshiva. The few rabbis, moyels, and sochets of Planet Shney barely had enough work for themselves. They had no incentive to encourage the training of more competition for their limited trade.

For anyone paying attention, there was precious little physical evidence pointing to the emergence of a Grand Yeshiva. Reaching the valley that was destined to be Vilna was no easy matter at the time. It required a long shlep on a primitive route that could barely be considered a road. Hardly anyone other than a very few construction workers had even been to the future site of the Grand Yeshiva and Holy Shtot to be witnesses of the goings-on. Those few could verify that the Mikvah was completed, but unattended and that the hotel and casino stood empty and unused, surrounded otherwise by a vast uninhabited landscape.

Nes continued to solicit donations where he could. Some people donated, it seems, as a hedging of bets, so to speak. After all, a modest donation to a holy endeavor might secure some favors in the World to Come, should anything come of it. Nes spent the money raised as he will, whether it evidently promoted the project or not.

In Moskve, Nes spent lavishly on cultural projects, hoping that would win back the favor of his wife. Moskve was certainly endowed by such spending although his public generosity had little effect on improving his relationship with his wife. The theater fulfilled Shprintza Freyda and she was no longer interested in whatever abstractions that her husband was selling.

News of the theoretical inception of the project had not even reached Planet Birobidzhan. The Grand Yeshiva project was contingent on a massive influx of rabbinic authorities and students immigrating from that distant world. No one on Planet Shney could possibly know the response from that quarter of the universe until the dreidl had completed its spin.

Nes’ big gamble would take four years to play out. Assuming that those that he trusted on Planet Birobidzhan played their parts well, the Yeshiva needed to be ready when the rabbis and students arrived. There was no particular reason for rushing the construction. Any gelt raised for that project was available to be invested otherwise for three and a half years. This presented Nes with a healthy slush fund that grew exponentially. Eventually, money would need to be spent as promised but with the timing right that would be essentially the interest and not the principle.

Rifka Leeba spent less and less time at home although she did bond with her father sometimes at the pool hall. Few people would suspect such a small child of cheating at cards, or using a loaded dreidl, or palming pieces in a friendly backgammon game. Rifka Leeba never lacked for pocket change, picking up what she wanted whenever she chose to at whichever game she joined in. When not eating meals with her gaggle of cousins, Rifka Leeba would grab a bite from one of the new cafés that had sprung up in Moskve, freer with money than most children her age.

The building of the Yeshiva might have been on hold but the hotel and casino was standing ready for guests if there was only a comfortable way of getting guests to the casino. Nes began spending money on the construction of the railway to connect his envisioned shtot to the increasingly prosperous shtot of Moskve. The resulting railway line is the high speed elevated train that now connects Moskve with Vilna.

The rail line terminus was the casino, the station being on the second floor of the building. All disembarking passengers walk past the card tables, roulette wheels, slot machines, and dreidl platforms as well as restaurants and shops before reaching the ground level and an exit to the rest of Vilna. In fact, when within the casino, one is essentially detached from the Holy Shtot. The casino is bright and airy with plenty of light, but there are no windows on those floors, no clocks or an acknowledgement of the time of day, and plenty of distractions to keep one engaged and disconnected from time and place. It is quite possible to travel to the Holy Shtot of Vilna and spend the entire visit within the casino until all one's gelt is spent or until obligations and commitments tug at one's conscience.

The fare for transportation, of course, is gratis in perpetuity, thanks to an endowment established by Nes. The stated reason for establishing cost-free train service between Moskve and the Holy Shtot of Vilna was to offer universal access to the Mikvah and the Yeshiva and raise the spiritual level planet wide. The money that poured into the casino was a side effect. Nonetheless, there were certainly cynics, especially in those early days, that were audacious enough to suggest that encouraging the flow of gelt into the casino and then Nes’ personal coffers was the actual purpose of the train.

Many years would pass before any sense of the spiritual significance of Vilna on Planet Shney began to shine through beyond the purely mercantile aspects of the shtot’s earliest incarnation. The distinction between kodesh l'chol, between the holy and the profane, that we recognize with Havdalah at the end of each Shabbos is not always so very clear. Nor is it self evident that holiness can arise from such a profane foundation as Nes had built.