Antisemitism & Bias
Seimas’s ‘Official Antisemite’ Announces Run to be Lithuania’s President. . .
Lithuanian parliament’s ‘proud antisemite’ announces run for president.
Defending History was first to analyze his statements for Holocaust-based context
The ‘pioneering’ hatemonger is arguably the first elected official in Eastern Europe to synthesize local far-right Holocaust revisionism and inversion with third-world style hatred of Israel
Are Members of the ‘International Working Group’ Being Tragically Misinformed on Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery?
OPINION | VILNIUS | OLD VILNA JEWISH CEMETERY | CEMETERIES | LITVAK AFFAIRS
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by Julius Norwilla (Vilnius)
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Like my fellow campaigners, over the years, in opposition to the project to plonk a national convention center in the heart of the Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery (via refurbishment of a hated Soviet “Sports Palace” dump that should have long ago been demolished), I felt nothing but relief and the need to express congratulations back in the summer of 2021 when our prime minister wisely cancelled the project. Over two years later, there is again fear, among Jews, Lithuanians, and many around the world who respect the right of the dead to lie in peace (verily a part of Human Rights), even when they are members of a minority. When the buried belong to a nation’s ethnic majority, there are usual no serious efforts to situate conference centers surrounded by subterranean graves (even when the above-ground gravestones have long disappeared).
Jump to:
Other Soviet structures in Vilnius: “landmark status” withdrawn & rapidly knocked down
Members of the latest (& current) international commission
Saga of the Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery
Full English Translation of Lithuanian Parliament Member Žemaitaitis’s Antisemitic Post that Revives Holocaust Era Tropes for Modern Lithuania
ANTISEMITISM | HUMAN RIGHTS | CHRISTIAN-JEWISH RELATIONS | LITHUANIA | LITVAK AFFAIRS
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JUMP TO TRANSLATION & SCREEN SHOT
VILNIUS—Instead of apologizing after unusually rapid responses by both the official Lithuanian Jewish Community and the Israeli Embassy in Vilnius, Lithuanian Parliament (Seimas) member Remigijus Žemaitaitis issued the following statement on Facebook on 8 May (English translation followed by screen shot of original from Facebook, taken 9 May at 14:30 from the 8 May FB post).
11 May update: Have any Lithuanian leaders, Western leaders, international Jewish organizations and human rights advocates, antisemitism watchdogs etc. yet publicly called for the immediate resignation of a parliamentarian in an EU/NATO national parliament whose published post (not “locker room talk”) revives local Hitler-era anti-Jewish hate speech equating Jews with Communism and Russian domination? “Wasting digital ink replying to the hater’s ‘arguments’ at Twitter and Bacebook is just not the same as a public statement calling for the hatemonger’s immediate resignation — as would be the case in any Western country. Lithuanian citizens deserve the same standard.”
12 May: Prime Minister Ingrida Sionyte boldly calls for impeachment inquiry. Can this rapidly be sharpened to a call for immediate resignation as in any other Western country?
As Defending History readers know from our antisemitism section, this is not the first time Middle Eastern and Israeli-Palestinian issues have been used by local bigots to smear Lithuania’s 700 year old Jewish community, of which over 96% were murdered in the Holocaust. But it is perhaps novel that the “triple whammy” of (1) antisemitism plus Middle Eastern issues have been added to (2) the Red Libel, the association made by Eastern European antisemitism, that the Jews in general were, are, and will always be associated above all with Communism; (3), a third implied pillar: the charge of disloyalty of the nation’s Jewish citizens (before the Holocaust a minority, now a tiny remnant under three thousand persons nationally).
Please Email Lithuania’s Prime Minister to Do Away with the Soviet Building Desecrating Vilnius’s Oldest Jewish Cemetery
OPINION | HUMAN RIGHTS | CHRISTIAN-JEWISH ISSUES | CEMETERIES & MASS GRAVES | OLD VILNA JEWISH CEMETERY AT PIRAMÓNT | OPPOSITION TO CONVENTION CENTER
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by Andrius Kulikauskas
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In 2020, Lithuania’s Prime Minister Ingrida Šimonytė struck funding and thereby ended plans to convert the Vilnius Sports and Concert Palace into a congress center. The Soviets had desecrated the heart of Vilnius’s oldest Jewish cemetery at Piramónt (Šnipiškės) by constructing and utilizing this building there. 53,000 people signed Ruta Bloshtein’s petition asking Lithuania’s leaders not to desecrate it further. Many people from around the world wrote letters which convinced the Prime Minister to strike funding.
In 2022, the Prime Minister announced the formation of a Commission to develop a vision whereby the Vilnius Sports and Concert Palace would be repurposed as a Jewish memorial and museum. Unfortunately, no compromise can make this building compatible with the cemetery it desecrates. Sadly, the Commission has yet to include any of the local Litvaks who opposed use of the building. International support is needed that their voices be heard.
On April 6th, as a member of Gerbkime kapines (Respect Cemeteries), I wrote to First Deputy Chancellor Rolandas Kriščiūnas to raise my concerns about this lack of representation. Sadly, he has been slow to reply.
But Who Will Now Tend to the Fate of the Vilnius Sports Palace?
OPINION | HUMAN RIGHTS | CHRISTIAN-JEWISH ISSUES | CEMETERIES & MASS GRAVES | OLD VILNA JEWISH CEMETERY AT PIRAMÓNT | OPPOSITION TO CONVENTION CENTER
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by Andrius Kulikauskas
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After several phone calls, I learned that First Deputy Chancellor of the Government of Lithuania, Rolandas Kriščiūnas, is responsible for organizing the Commission which will develop the vision for the future of the Vilnius Sports and Concert Palace and the Jewish cemetery at Piramont (Šnipiškės) which this building desecrates. On April 6, 2023, I wrote him with my concerns that the Commission include some of the local Litvaks who had opposed the conversion of this building into a congress center and who now oppose its conversion into a Jewish memorial or museum.
I have yet to receive a reply.
Here is my letter, translated from Lithuanian into English:
For Vilnius’s 700 Year Celebrations, Antisemitic ‘Artists’ Launch Vicious New Holocaust-‘Justifying’ Souvenir
ANTISEMITISM | 700 YEARS OF VILNIUS CELEBRATIONS | POLITICS OF MEMORY | DOUBLE GENOCIDE
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VILNIUS—This commemorative envelope was purchased this morning, on Easter Sunday, on Pilies gatve, Vilnius’s historic Castle Street that has become the city’s center for souvenir stalls and shops. It is an older antisemitic envelope design seen many times before, picturing the Jews of Kaunas allegedly welcoming the Soviet army into town during World War II (i.e. blaming the Jews for the 1940 Soviet occupation as excuse for the genocide — the Lithuanian Holocaust — that followed a year later, wiping out some 96.4% of Lithuanian Jewry, with thousands murdered in late June 1941 before the Germans even took over).
Latvia is a Democracy: So Why Fear Critique of Annual Riga Worship of Hitler’s Waffen SS?
OPINION | LATVIA | RIGA MARCHES | ROLAND BINET’S DECADES OF PEACEFUL AND MUSICAL PROTEST | VILNIUS MARCHES | KAUNAS MARCHES | PRO-NAZI MARCHES IN EASTERN EUROPE | GLORIFICATION OF COLLABORATORS | ANTISEMITISM
VILNIUS—In the opinion of all in the Defending History community, modern Latvia is a free, democratic, peaceful, tolerant and delightful country that has in little over three decades successfully managed a dramatic transition to the conceptual and spiritual heart of the European Union and the NATO alliance of democratic nations. What a day-and-night contrast with the trajectory of its huge eastern neighbor Russia over these same decades: from the high hopes of the heady Yeltsin years in the 1990s to today’s dictatorial, criminal Russian Federation, led by our century’s most deranged dictator, that has been imprisoning and killing so many of its own people in addition, now, to the mass murder of thousands of innocent civilians in the course of the ongoing barbaric invasion of neighboring, peaceful and democratic Ukraine (Defending History’s statement in support of a rapid and complete Ukrainian victory).
Papers by Professor Michael Shafir (1944-2022)
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Please send additions and corrections to info@defendinghistory.com. Thank you.
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Between Denial and “Comparative Trivialization”: Holocaust Negationism in Post-Communist East Central Europe
The Nature of Postcommunist Antisemitism in East Central Europe: Ideology’s Backdoor Return
Conceptualizing Hungarian Negationism in Comparative Perspective: Deflection and Obfuscation
Political Antisemitism in Romania: Hard Data and its Soft Underbelly
A Present Chiaroscuro: Review of Himka & Michlich (eds), Bringing the Dark Past to Light: the Reception of the Holocaust in Postcommunist Europe
Questions and Answers on the Holocaust-Gulag “Comparative Martyrology”
Einmal mehr zu einer Vergangenheit, die nicht vergeht
Russian Warship, Go F**k Yourself! (Tale of an Overdue Vilnius Cultural Version)
OPINION | LITVAK AFFAIRS | (AB)USE OF JEWISH STUDIES FOR HISTORICAL REVISIONISM | YIDDISH AFFAIRS | YIVO IN LITHUANIA | MEDIA WATCH | FOREIGN MINISTRIES AND JUDAIC STUDIES | COLLABORATORS GLORIFIED | NOREIKA GLORIFIED
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by Julius Norwilla (Vilnius)
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The first phase of the eradication of the Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery at Piramónt in Shnípishok — modern Šnipiškės — and of the people buried there, started back in 1830, contemporaneous with an uprising against the Russian Empire. The November Uprising, as it is now known, started with the will to resist the czarist government’s plans to send the army of Poland — at the time an autonomous kingdom within the Russian Empire — to Belgium and France, as well as with the dreams of restoring Polish independence. In 1831, seeing that the uprising for independence would soon take over Vilna, the Russian Imperial government expropriated a section of the Jewish cemetery by the bank of the Viliya (now Neris), and established an artillery citadel to keep the freedom-loving city at all times in the crosshairs of its cannon barrels. But even after the establishment of the citadel, more than three quarters of the actual graves (and their stoness or mini-mausoleums, oyhólim) remained untouched. This legendary cemetery is a Litvak pantheon, a monument to the civilization of Lithuanian Jewry. So it is meaningful that its first phase of destruction got underway just as the Russian imperial government’s project to enhance its military presence in Vilna, by making sure that the city’s inhabitants live in constant fear.
Is Walking Down a Street Named for a Murderer Now Considered ‘Holocaust Remembrance’?
Opinion | Collaborators Glorified | Antanas Baltūsis-Žvejas | Politics of Memory | Lithuania | History
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by Evaldas Balčiūnas
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Antanas Baltūsis-Žvejas (1915–1948) is remembered by the Republic of Lithuania for his anti-Soviet guerilla activities after the war but without regard for the three separate periods of his activity in service to Nazi activities to exterminate the Jewish people. He did indeed join the anti-Soviet partisan resistance movement in the spring of 1945. And, before his death, he did become the head of its Tauras County unit. Those who heroize this period of his activities emphasize his efforts in establishing military discipline and order in the county. His critics, in turn, are more likely to make reference to his order to the Žalgiris Detachment, subordinate to the Tauras County, to annihilate Russian (Soviet) civilian settlers (“colonists”) in Opšrūtai, who had been transferred to Lithuania according to the Soviet-Nazi repatriation agreement (often with little or no input from these folks themselves). Thirty-one persons perished in Opšrūtai, including fourteen children. In the partisans’ descriptions of the battle, it is easy to notice that their task was to eradicate all colonists, including children. Those who justify the atrocity against civilians, including children, say that it was necessary to thwart the russification of Lithuania.
Lithuania’s policy of historical memory was quite straightforward on this issue: it built a monument to the partisans of the Žalgiris Detachment in Opšrūtai. Ethnic cleansing of Jews, if done by “our own nationalist heroes” in Lithuania, is still seen, it seems, as acceptable.
Subtle Art of State Antisemitism ― East European Style (with ubiquitous nod to glorification of Holocaust collaborators)
OPINION | LITVAK AFFAIRS | (AB)USE OF JEWISH STUDIES FOR HISTORICAL REVISIONISM | YIDDISH AFFAIRS | YIVO IN LITHUANIA | MEDIA WATCH | FOREIGN MINISTRIES AND JUDAIC STUDIES | COLLABORATORS GLORIFIED | NOREIKA GLORIFIED
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by Julius Norwilla (Vilnius)
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On the 4th of April 2022, the website of our Ministry of Foreign Affairs published a news item titled (in Lithuanian, here translated) “Lithuania will expand cooperation with Yivo Jewish Research Institute, preserving and publicizing Lithuanian Jewish history” (as PDF). The site’s English language section uses the headline wording “Lithuania to expand cooperation with Yivo Institute for Jewish Research to protect and promote the history and heritage of Lithuanian Jews” (as PDF).
The news article contains information about the visit of the esteemed American scholar, Dr. Jonathan Brent, the executive director and CEO of the Yivo Institute for Jewish Research in New York, also a famed educator and academic publisher, with his colleagues, and their meeting with the deputy foreign minister. The news item appears intent on communicating to the world how much our country’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs cares about its Jewish and Yiddish legacy and how sensitive it is to the history of Lithuanian Jewry.
Both the Lithuanian and English versions are illustrated with a three-photo gallery portraying three scenes of the meeting: shaking hands at the welcome, a moment at the meeting table and the final with those at the meeting posing for the official photo-op.
Everything seems to be done according to the usual protocols of such meetings, at which the professional photographer takes numerous photos from start to finish, culminating with the final photo-op. Then the few dozen shots are whittled down to the most informative and appropriate handful for publication. The ones that make the point best. Elementary.
Exotic Antisemitism? Declaring a Soviet Ruin to be a National Treasure — to Keep an Old City-Center Jewish Cemetery Verily Underground?
OPINION | ANTISEMITISM | OLD VILNA JEWISH CEMETERY | CEMETERIES | HUMAN RIGHTS | LITVAK AFFAIRS
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by Dovid Katz
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Antisemitism takes many forms in the twenty-first century. It includes the religion-based, the anti-Israel-based, the globalization-based, the envy-based, and the drunk-violence based — all the way to sophisticated and elegant forms that are so sublimated that it is hard to discern what’s what. In Eastern Europe, some rather exotic forms flourish: hatred of remnant local Jewish communities (who know the truth about the Holocaust-relevant roles played by local nationalists during the Holocaust years of 1941-1944/45) alongside love of rich, distant foreign Jews (who can be charmed right to the high heavens with medals, junkets and photo-ops to help underpin Double Genocide revisionism — and sometimes cover for glorification of local collaborators — as part, naturally, of “Holocaust remembrance” or “commemoration of the victims of equal genocidal regimes”).
Then there is the occasionally encountered East European love of substantial Jewish sacred sites that are suitably far from the center of town (“best place is the forest, you know!”) and provide a fine niche in-season tourism without upsetting the ethnic-purity concocted versions of town-center history that want it to be say pure Ukrainian (Lviv/Lvov/Lemberg), pure Latvian (Riga), or pure Lithuanian (Vilnius/Vilna/Wilno/Vílne).
The hard fought battle to keep the convention center out of the old Vilna Jewish cemetery was won last summer (report in the AJ). It will go down in history as a victory for Lithuania and all the country’s true friends. Now comes Part II.
Painful Setback for Vilnius’s Standing in the West: Square is Named for a Brutal 1941 LAF Holocaust Collaborator
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City Council Opens Brand New Square Named for Alleged 1941 Holocaust Murderer Juozas Lukša (“Daumantas”) in spite of pleas and testimony from the (late) last Holocaust Survivors who provided evidence. Macabre note: A few city council members told us off the record that placing the square away from the city center or old town represents “a grand compromise with the Jews”… Some have cited far-right demands for the square to be opposite the Jewish Community building.
See Defending History’s chronology of the 2021 debate, including links to Alex Faitelson’s book, British Parliament members’ 2012 early day motion, and 2021 calls from World Jewish Congress’s Dr. Laurence Weinbaum, the Jewish Community of Lithuania, and (very unusually) the American Jewish Committee. See essays by Defending History’s Dovid Katz and Evaldas Balčiūnas.
Chronicle of the Lithuanian Government’s Campaign to Blame Holocaust Survivors who Joined the Resistance
UPDATED MARCH 2017. See also (older, not updated) Responses page.
2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011
2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017
PREFACE
The campaign of defamation by Lithuanian state prosecutors and allied elites (particularly in the Genocide Center and the antisemitic right-wing press) has resulted in a number of cherished Holocaust Survivors being smeared as “war criminals” without a single charge ever having been leveled against anybody. Launched in 2006, the campaign, abusing tools such as “pre-trial investigations” and leaks to the media, have sought to brand as “war criminals” the heroes of the war against Hitler. It grew in 2011 with the addition of equally perverse “libel charges,” launched with fanfare when Interpol (!) was sent to disturb in Tel Aviv the elected head of the last active group of Litvak Holocaust survivors in the world. Then, in 2013, the state’s “red-brown commission” defamed one of Vilnius’s last survivors on equally perverse grounds, all the while putting on “Holocaust events” for naive Western audiences, usually funded by the (unknowing) Lithuanian taxpayer, in venues including London, New York, Toronto, and Vilnius.
A single public letter from the president could fix it all. Instantly.
The campaign of defamation results in permanent calumny in historians’ works, Wikipedia, and elsewhere (see below) that is more than a grave injustice to the Holocaust survivors targeted (and their families). It is a deliberate ultranationalist falsification of history in the spirit of the wider campaign to find fault with the victims and make heroes of the perpetrators. These are components of the movement to obfuscate the issues, and downgrade the Holocaust in the spirit of the Double Genocide movement and its central document, the 2008 Prague Declaration.
All but one of the accused survivors — most in their late eighties or nineties — were still alive (as of February 2016). Dr. Rachel Margolis passed away on 6 July 2015, having failed to fulfill her final wish of one last trip to her native Vilna. A single public letter of apology from the president or prime minister of Lithuania, accompanied by an apology from the state prosecutors, would be the minimal gesture of good will needed to repair the damage. Public defamation can only be (partly) repaired by public apology. Dr. Yitzhak Arad died in May 2021.
Moreover, the state has a splendid last chance to end its relationship with its own Holocaust survivors, after a 700 year history in Lithuania, on a rather higher note than police coming to look for aged women veterans of the heroic Jewish resistance in the forests of Lithuania.
During his own tenure before these events, Lithuania’s eminent late president (later prime minister) Algirdas Brazauskas, a champion of confronting historical truth with courage and dignity, awarded certificates of honor to the selfsame Jewish partisan veterans for the selfsame service in helping to liberate Lithuania from Nazism. . .
2006
22 April 2006. Article in Respublika accuses Dr. Yitzhak Arad, Holocaust survivor, resistance hero, veteran of the Israeli war of independence and long-time director of Yad Vashem, of being a war criminal on the basis of misquoted, decontextualized passages in his own 1979 book, The Partisan. [ADDENDUM of April 2014: One of the chief stone-throwers (final section) is A. Anušauskas, who is today a member of the state’s commission on Nazi and Soviet crimes. In 2006 he was “scientific editor” at the Genocide Center. Since 2008 he has been a member of parliament where he was for some years chair of the Committee on National Security and Defense.]
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2007
10 September 2007. Prosecutors in Lithuania confirm that their investigation of Holocaust survivor, anti-Nazi resistance hero and former director of Yad Vashem Dr. Yitzhak Arad, on suspicion of “crimes against humanity” had been initiated in May 2006. The “investigation” was based on an article in the antisemitic daily Respublika (22 April 2006), in which the special prosecutor and head of the Genocide Center are extensively quoted. In June 2006 the daily triumphantly proclaimed that prosecutors were acting on its earlier article. English summary. See below at 25 September 2008 for “conclusion” of the investigation and the 2010 report of the “Lithuanian Human Rights Association” . . . In 2014, ongoing defamation evident from Wikipedia entry.
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2008
29 January 2008. Article in the daily Lietuvos aidas that called on prosecutors to investigate Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky and Dr Rachel Margolis. English translation.
6 April 2008. Professor Dov Levin of Jerusalem protests, returning his own earlier award to the president of Lithuania.
30 April 2008. The Embassy of the United States in Lithuania issues a certificate of appreciation, signed by Ambassador John A. Cloud, to Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky; presented by political officer Joseph Boski at a luncheon organized by the Vilnius Yiddish Institute.
In “Shameful” Decision Lithuanian Parliament Appoints Glorifier of Holocaust Collaborators as Director of State’s “Genocide Center”
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Secret ballot: 76 for, 34 against,8 abstentions, 2 spoiled ballots
Local reports (generally lacking any inkling of the international uproar over adulation of Holocaust perpetrators): 15 min.lt; alfa.lt; alkas.lt; delfi.lt; lrt.lt; lzb.lt; respublika.lt
Defending History broke news of the nomination on 14 April
“No, Sir. This is No Photoshop”
Algemeiner Journal is first foreign publication to cover the affair in reports of 15 April and of 22 April
see also: Arutz Sheva
Earlier: On the Bubnys nomination. In the Algemeiner Journal. On Dr. Bubnys’s record. The state-sponsored Genocide Center. On glorifying collaborators.
The Seven Simple Solutions to Irksome Lithuanian-Jewish Issues
Some Simple and Constructive Solutions to the Irksome “Jewish Issues” that Continue to Haunt the Lithuanian Government and Its Agencies
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NOTE: The original (2009) version of this document was constructed in close cooperation with the late Dr. Shimon Alperovich (1928-2014), elected head of the Jewish Community of Lithuania for many years. Revisions were discussed with him in detail until several days before his death in 2014. Naturally, he does not bear responsibility for the document’s annual updates since that time but his intellectual imprint on its spirit should not go uncredited.
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Abandonment of the state’s financing of the campaign to obfuscate the Holocaust by means of its Double Genocide campaign, including “cooked” international events, conferences, film screenings and panel discussions; withdrawal of formal state support for the Prague Declaration and similar projects, closing down of the “red-brown commission” and the inauguration of an atmosphere of full freedom for citizens and organizations to support alternatives including the Seventy Years Declaration. Holocaust history to be included in historically accurate proportionality in the Genocide Museum and all relevant tourist locations that deal with genocide. Abandonment of the extensive state sponsored program to glorify the local Holocaust perpetrators of 1941, including the “Lithuanian Activist Front” (LAF), whose leaflets indicated desire to murder the country’s Jewish citizens even before arrival of Nazi forces. Rapid correction of the mischaracterization of the early local perpetrators as supposedly heroic rebels in the new basement room on the Holocaust in the Genocide Museum.
Defending the Cemetery on Tíshebov in Vilnius and Beyond
OPINION | HUMAN RIGHTS | CHRISTIAN-JEWISH ISSUES | CEMETERIES & MASS GRAVES | OLD VILNA JEWISH CEMETERY AT PIRAMÓNT | OPPOSITION TO CONVENTION CENTER PROJECT | INTERNATIONAL PETITION
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by Andrius Kulikauskas
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“Gerbkime kapines” (Respect Cemeteries) at www.kapines.com is our small team of Lithuanians and Litvaks who are working together locally to defend the honor of the oldest Vilnius Jewish Cemetery, known variously as the Piramont or Šnipiškės Cemetery. The Soviets desecrated the site by building a Sports Palace there. The Republic of Lithuania and the City of Vilnius are moving ahead with their plans to open a convention center there in 2023.
Our team is now reaching out internationally with a variety of activities to join or support. We need writers, translators, researcher, web page creators and maintainers, and we also need donations.