Marijampolė Municipality
Suvalkija
diaspora art gallery in a former synagogue
P. Butlerienės g. 5, Marijampolė
54.55600, 23.35170
45-90 minutes
year-round
B. Kleizaitė-Vasaris Art Gallery, Marijampolė synagogue Hakhnasat Orhim
Beatričė Kleizaitė-Vasaris Art Gallery: diaspora returns home
Beatričė Kleizaitė-Vasaris Art Gallery is an art gallery in central Marijampolė, located in a restored former Jewish synagogue. It consists of several exhibition spaces that preserve and display more than 470 professional artworks, mostly by Lithuanian diaspora artists.
The gallery has operated since 2014 and is a branch of the Marijampolė Meilė Lukšienė Education Centre. It is a rare place in Lithuania where a large diaspora art collection is permanently exhibited not in the capital but in a regional city. Two layers of memory meet here: the creativity of the Lithuanian diaspora and a home of Jewish heritage.
Beatričė Kleizaitė-Vasaris and the collection
The core of the collection is the gift to Marijampolė from art historian, cultural figure, and patron Beatričė Kleizaitė-Vasaris (1925-2023). Born in Kaunas, she left for the West in 1948, lived in Argentina, Canada, and the United States, worked as a librarian and lecturer, directed Lithuanian theatre groups, and returned to Lithuania in 1991.
Throughout her life she collected works by Lithuanian diaspora artists and brought them back to Lithuania. The gallery shows works by Adomas Galdikas, Vytautas Kašuba, Vytautas Ignas, Albinas Elskus, Vytautas Kazimieras Jonynas, Stasys Eidrigevičius, and other diaspora artists. Sources give different figures for the size of her gift, from more than 300 to more than 400 works, while the gallery collection has grown to more than 470.
The synagogue building
The gallery is located in Marijampolė's best-preserved masonry synagogue, known as Hakhnasat Orhim. It is thought to have been designed around 1899 by city architect Valerijus Rybarskis, but the original project has not survived, so the authorship should be treated as probable. The building is entered in the Cultural Heritage Register.
Before the Second World War a synagogue operated here; during the Holocaust, Marijampolė's Jewish community was murdered. In the Soviet period the building was adapted for other uses: it functioned as an engineers' house and later as an education centre, and since 2014 it has housed the gallery. The place is worth seeing also as a marker of Jewish heritage memory.
Visiting
At the time of research, the gallery was open Tuesday-Friday 11:00-18:00 and Saturday 10:00-15:00, and closed Sunday and Monday. Exact visiting times, ticket or free-entry conditions should be checked on the official institutional page, while groups and educational activities should be arranged in advance.
About an hour is enough for the visit. The gallery combines well with Marijampolė Basilica, the regional museum, Poetry Park, and the Šešupė riverbank, all close by in the city centre. Do not confuse this gallery with the M. B. Stankūnienė Art Gallery of Marijampolė Cultural Centre; that is a different institution and a different donor.
