The ongoing international controversy over construction and development that is leading to desecration of the old Jewish cemetery in Vilna may eventually be resolved by utilizing a modern technology which has the ability to "see" underground, although some experts contend such a resolution could end up backfiring.
by Binyamin Rose
Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) systems have been in use since the 1970s, when America used them in Vietnam to detect underground bunkers where Vietcong guerillas were holed up. But perhaps one of its earliest successful applications in the Jewish world was in 1995, when geophysicists found the remains of Israeli Air Force pilot Eran Cohen, enabling his burial twenty-two years after his Phantom fighter jet was shot down over the Nile River Delta rice paddies during the Yom Kippur War.
The technology was also put to use some years ago for a team of Israeli investigative journalists surveying lines at several Israeli cemeteries to determine whether they may have been the unmarked graves of kidnapped Yemenite children.
 Amit Ronen, a geophysicist at Geotec Engineering and Environmental Geophysics Ltd., was part of the team that found Eran Cohen and worked on the Yemenite children's project. He noted that GPR is so sensitive, it can detect one of the unique trademarks of a halachic burial in Israel: the tefach, or handbreadth, of hollow space left between the body and the underground tombstone placed over the body that confines the ritual contamination to the grave.
"This void can still be seen for tens of years, at least, so we can always tell if it's a Jewish grave," says Ronen, who has been working with GPR technology since 1992.
Whether this technology would be useful in resolving the dispute over the precise borders of Vilna's old Jewish cemetery, is a matter of debate among experts in the physical sciences and Jewish burial.
Rabbi Dovid Schmidl, a board member of the Asra Kadisha, and a worldrenowned halachic expert in Jewish burial for several decades, says he is skeptical.
"We found that even the best ground radar machines can be quite inaccurate," said Rabbi Schmidl. "Also, the operators normally test only a small portion of the entire site; then they extrapolate that data to the rest of the area, not to mention that their interpretation of the data is totally subjective."
Rabbi Schmidl says that the Asra Kadisha has taken GPR equipment to sites where the burial plots have already been conclusively mapped, just to doublecheck their accuracy and have found the results to be well off the mark.
Sense of History This technology, not to mention the skills and experience to interpret findings correctly, will come in handy if Jewish groups are finally permitted to go ahead with a geophysical survey at the site of the old Snipiskes Jewish cemetery, which served as Jewish Vilna's main burial ground for more than 300 years until the 1830s when it became too crowded to accommodate further burials.
Since then, two new Jewish cemeteries have been built in Vilna, known today as Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania.
 The Nazis destroyed the old cemetery during their occupation of Lithuania during World War II, removing gravestones and other evidence of the Jewish burial ground. When the Soviet Union took control of Lithuania following World War II, it too committed acts of desecration.
However, the Soviets did allow the Jewish community to re-inter the Vilna Gaon and five others, including the Gaon’s father and son, and Avraham ben Avraham, the famous "Ger Tzedek," before shutting off Jewish access to the site.
Vilna is fast becoming one of Europe's leading tourist attractions, especially for youth. If a tourist were to enter the heart of Vilna,  cross the Neris River and stroll through one of the city's famous parks and green areas that comprise a large percentage of the city, he would see a cosmopolitan city with a diversity of culture and architecture. Vilna today is home to some 550,000 people, about 3,500 of them Jews. However, that tourist would never suspect that at the northeast junction of Olimpieciu and Rinktines Streets, a Jewish cemetery Lithuanian authorities contend that one set shows that the current construction is outside the confines of the old cemetery, but Jewish officials say there is a second set of maps with contrary data, which they contend are more authentic
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