In the 20th century and again attempts were made to build the Museum of Jewish culture in Vilnius, to be exact, there were three of them. The first time occurred in 1913, but the Museum he worked until the outbreak of the Second world war. During the existence of the Museum was a collection of unique pieces of folk art, documents and periodicals, books. By the beginning of world war II in their collection of the Museum consisted of over 6 million books, thousands of documents, historical and ethnographic works. It was created by a large number of periodicals in more than 11 languages, as well as a rich collection of folklore. The Museum could provide more than three thousand works of art. But during the war it was almost completely destroyed.

In 1944 he was again recreated the Museum of the people who survived the war. The second Museum was intended to revive Jewish culture and to preserve the memory of thousands of people died at the hands of fascism, and were shot, burned and tortured in the concentration camps. June 10, 1949, the Museum was closed on the orders of the Soviet authorities, who cited a policy of anti-Semitism. The entire Museum collection was divided between the Lithuanian archives and museums.

In the period of the time when Lithuania was a Soviet Republic, it was impossible to create any institution that could deal with Jewish culture and religion. Forty years later, on 1 October 1989, he started working the third Museum of Jewish culture that has a place to be still. The head of the Museum was the head of the Ministry of education and culture.

Open in 1989 the Lithuanian State Museum named after the Vilna Gaon had collection, consisting of accessories of Jewish ethnic culture, pictures, articles, printed and handwritten documents, books and works of art. Not only the main and auxiliary funds contain 5 thousand exhibits each.

The richest collection of the Museum's collections can be divided into four sections: collection of photos of monuments, famous political and cultural events, monuments of prominent people, as well as monuments of everyday life; a collection of cultural items that were used in various religious rituals, because they had historical significance, the oldest exhibits were submitted by the dates of the 18th century; a collection of manuscripts and printed material (diaries, letters and documents); a collection of drawings, sculptures, paintings and textiles. The Museum has works of artists: Efron, Mitoma, Lurie, mane-Katz, Bindler, Perkova, Margashirsha and other prominent people.

The synagogue is the main body of Judaism, cultural, political and economic center of the Jewish community. Currently in Lithuania there are two functioning synagogues in Kaunas and Vilnius.

Elijah Ben Solomon Zalman – the Vilna Gaon (1720-1797 years) was the most enlightened scholar of the Torah and Talmud in the 17th and 18th centuries. His extraordinary intelligence and high spirituality gave him a great advantage in the interpretation of the Talmud and the Torah. To these studies he devoted all his life. The greatest number of his works were written in Russian and Lithuanian languages. This man developed new methods for the study of the Talmud, as well as criticisms. He did his best to return the Jewish law to rational initial basis.

Elijah Ben Solomon Zalman found the use of the main methods of the Babylonian Talmud and Jerusalem. He was the first Jewish scholar who understood that aging documents always leads to error and misunderstanding written. If there were cases, when the text was causing too many doubts, he carefully held its comparison with the original. He made it clear that written in complex and vague fragments. In addition, Gaon seriously studied geography and history, a branch of mathematics, anatomy and astronomy. He wrote some 70 works on a variety of topics, published after his death.

At the moment the Museum has several permanent exhibitions that are dedicated to the tragic fate of the Jews before the Second world war.