The Survivor community and its supporters, Holocaust studies and commemoration circles, and numerous members of the Lithuanian Jewish community felt betrayed by the largely secret Holocaust education conference organized by the US embassy in Vilnius from 29 November to 3 December 2010, in close cooperation with local state-sponsored ‘Double Genocide’ proponents. The event included excellent individual scholars and educators, both from Lithuania and abroad, alongside notoriously obfuscationist local institutions, including the ‘Red-Brown Commission’ and the Genocide Research Center.

The American embassy’s conference in Vilnius was the subject of comment in  The Tablet (US), and in the London Guardian (by Efraim Zuroff and Dovid Katz).

Information and commentary on the event are available as follows:

• €63,572 application to ITF
• €63,572 grant is announced by Pres. Obama’s Envoy on Antisemitism (27 April 2010)
• Holocaust Survivors ask US Embassy to release details of the project (16 Sept 2010)
• US Embassy: ‘Public’ Diplomacy grant and conference sessions ‘Not Public’ (25 Oct 2010)
• Conference Program
• Efraim Zuroff in the Guardian (29 Nov 2010)
• Dovid Katz in Tablet Magazine (3 Dec 2010)
• Dovid Katz in the Guardian (21 Dec 2010)