Audience Decoding Strategies: Memory Communication of the Jewish Museum in Vilnius (1944–1949)

Abstract

The Visitors’ Book of the Sholom Aleichem exhibition Jewish Museum in Vilnius (1944–1949), preserved at the Judaica collection of Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania and reviewed between May 1946 and January 1947, is a unique source which provides insight into audience reactions to the traumatic memory narratives constructed within the museum. Drawing on unpublished and published sources, and by applying Stuart Hall’s encoding and decoding model, this article analyzes the visitors’ entries as distinct decoding practices revealing how audiences received, negotiated, or opposed the messages conveyed by the museum. The study demonstrates that the museum’s encoding strategies and the visitors’ decoding practices formed a dynamic communicative whole in which the official Soviet discourse overlapped with the community’s memory narratives. Within this structure, the Visitors’ Book of the Sholom Aleichem exhibition functioned as a special medium, documenting the voices of the audience and their active engagement with the museum’s messages. Thus, even under conditions of totalitarian rule, the museum became a kind of semiospheric space where memory was encoded, rewritten, and transformed. This heritage object expands our understanding of postwar memory culture and highlights a broader issue that such sources in Lithuania are still receiving insufficient scholarly attention.