Jews have settled in the lands of Moletai and Utena three centuries ago. Alanta synagogue is a model jewish house of prayer and education of those times. Moletai jewish commercial buildings are important for their architecture. In addition - jewish trade and crafts were prospering in them. Traditional jewish art symbols and writings in hebrew are chiselled out on tombstones at ancient jewish cemeteries. Tragic fate of jews during holocaust has been eternalized in the monument at mass grave in Moletai.
The wooden synagogue of Alanta is one of the few surviving wooden houses of prayer of this type in Lithuania. Judging from the architecture, it is assumed that this prayer house was built in the second half of the 19th century. Its facades are divided by straps, the windows of the men's hall are semi-circular arches, surrounded by profiled edges, while the two-story part has small rectangle windows. The specific shapes of the building were determined by certain requirements: divisions into men's and women's sides, places for reading the Holy Scriptures (bimas) and storage. After World War II, this synagogue was used as a grain warehouse.
The synagogue has been reconstructed and will be handed over to the administration of the Molėtai district municipality in order to adapt the cultural heritage object protected by the state to the implementation of the Municipality's cultural and educational tourism (exhibitions, expositions, introduction to the history of the synagogue building and the local Jewish community) activities.
On August 29, 1941, about 700 Jewish men, women and children were shot in Molėtai.
A monument with inscriptions in Lithuanian and Hebrew marks the site of the mass killing of Jewish people.
Jewish people settled in Molėtai in the first half of the 18th century. This is confirmed by the permit signed by the Bishop of Vilnius letting them build a synagogue. Until the Second World War, Jewish people remained the dominant group of the town's population.
For Jewish people, the establishment of a cemetery was one of the most important conditions for settling in the town. It had to be located outside the town, about 25 meters from the nearest residential house.
The old Jewish cemetery is preserved in front of Molėtai Stadium, on Kreivoji Street. The old cemetery is surrounded by a metal fence. Only in the central part of the hill are fourteen surviving monuments standing in rows. Tombstones, like graves, are oriented in the direction of Jerusalem. The monument erected on the grave – “maceiva” - is usually in the form of an arch, on the top of which two Hebrew letters (P and N) are carved - an abbreviation of "po nikbar" (Hebrew - "buried here").
There used to be a building used for Jewish rites next to the cemetery gates. There was the mourning of the deceased, the saying of the last words about them and the reading of passages from the Holy Scriptures.
This is a significant object in the city of Molėtai, which survived at least two fires that devastated the city and has remained to this day. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, most of the inhabitants of Molėtai were Jewish people. In 1870, they made up two-thirds of the town's population. Almost all trade was in their hands. A red brick building has been preserved in the center of Molėtai until today. Until 1940, private Jewish shops operated here, and there were residential apartments on the second floor. Now there are many different shops and a pizzeria in the building.
Next to the Tauragnai-Kuktiškės road is the village of Avižieniškis. On the north-western side, the road branches off towards the old Jewish cemetery of Tauragnai. After driving along the Tauragnai forest road, on the right side - the territory of the cemetery. It is surrounded by a low stone masonry fence covered with moss. Most of the tombstones are in the western part of the cemetery. Most of them are fallen, broken, stuck in the ground or just their fragments remain. In the cemetery, the ground surface is uneven, with wild grass growing. The old Jewish cemetery is surrounded by a forest on all sides, only on the northern side - a slope that ends at the shore of Lake Labė.
Jewish people would try to hold funerals on the day of death or at least the next day. If it's a Saturday, they couldn’t do many things related to the burial. The deceased would be taken to the cemetery in a wooden box. They would be buried without a coffin. A memorial service would be held at the grave thirty days after the death. After that, they would build a tombstone - a matzevah. The old Jewish cemetery of Tauragnai mostly has granite tombstones with engraved inscriptions in Hebrew characters. These are names, parents' names, and date of death according to the Jewish calendar. At the bottom of the tombstones are engraved five letters in Hebrew, which represent words from the Bible: “May his (or her) soul be bound up in the bond of eternal life”. In this cemetery you can find the memorial stones of Kohanim (priests). They are marked by symbols: two palms next to each other, tilted towards each other and with spaces between the fingers - between the ring finger and middle finger of each hand and between the index finger and thumb of each hand. The Kohanim are the descendants of Aaron, the brother of the Jewish prophet Moses.
When visiting a grave, it is customary to place a stone on it. The custom comes from the times when only a pile of stones marked the place of a grave.
