Monthly Archives: December 2019

Defending History’s Person of the Year 2020 to be Announced New Year’s Eve



VILNIUS—Please watch this space. Defending History’s Person of the Year 2020 will be announced a minute after midnight on New Year’s Eve 2020. For previous laureates, please see, among others, those for 2014, 20152018, and 2019. For Defending History’s conceptualization of the annual awarding in the context of current East European issues, please see our 2019 editorial.

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Ruta Bloshtein Responds to Latest Call for a Convention Center Atop the Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery



OPINION  |  OLD VILNA JEWISH CEMETERY  |OPPOSITION TO CONVENTION CENTER PROJECT  |  INTERNATIONAL PETITION

by Ruta Bloshtein (Vilnius)

This article appeared in Lithuanian on the website of the official Jewish Community of Lithuania. After the site’s editor refused to publish an English version on the site’s extensive English-language section, the author released this text for publication here. See also Ms. Bloshtein’s recent article in New York’s Algemeiner Journal. She is the author of the international petition concerning the Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery.

In his article “On the Reconstruction of the Palace of Sports on the Old Vilnius Šnipiškės (Piramont) Jewish Cemetery into the New Congress Center” (“Dėl Sporto rūmų rekonstrukcijos ant esančių senųjų Vilniaus žydų Šnipiškių (Piramonto) kapinių į naują Kongresų centrą”), published on the Lithuanian Jewish Community website on December 12, 2019, the author expresses his concern over the possibility of the cemetery being desecrated for the third time if the decision to demolish the building of the Palace of Sports was made.

The author calls the suggestion to restore the cemetery a “delirious fantasy”—in effect a slur against the suggestion by highly esteemed Professor Sid Leiman, who has spent many years researching the history, plans, and epitaphs of the Piramónt (Šnipiškės) Cemetery in great detail.

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Posted in Cemeteries and Mass Graves, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery at Piramónt (in Šnipiškės / Shnípishok), Opinion, Ruta (Reyzke) Bloshtein | Comments Off on Ruta Bloshtein Responds to Latest Call for a Convention Center Atop the Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery

OLDER FRONT PAGE POSTS


21 January 2018

“Defending History Brings Results”

Jewish Gravestones Used as Main Steps to Vilnius’s Central Reformed Evangelical Church are Finally Returned to Jewish Cemetery

5 years after Defending History’s 2013 report brought the issue to international attention


15 January 2019

Vilnius Court Case on State Honors for a Holocaust Collaborator is Adjourned to March 5th

Defending History was there. Read our full report. Get acquainted with the extraordinary background. Ofer Aderet in Haarets.

THE PLAINTIFFS’ TABLE: Dr. Andrius Kulikauskas, longtime contributing writer at DH (left) represented absent American plaintiff Grant Gochin at the hearing on state honors for Holocaust collaborator J. Noreika, whose case was first brought to the English speaking world in 2012  by Evaldas Balčiūnas, who was also in attendance.  At right is attorney Rokas Rudzinskas. PHOTO © Defending History 2019.

Evaldas Balčiūnas, who first brought the case of Jonas Noreika to the English speaking world back in 2012, now reflects on his “7 years with Noreika”

To mark the case being brought to court, Identity Films re-releases 2012 documentary free online; Richard Bloom Productions re-releases its own 2013 documentary


January 2019

From Near and Far

Columbia University’s Prof. Tarik Cyril Amar returns medal to city of Lviv after it names 2019 for Bandera


Defending History names its Person of the Year for 2019: a man who volunteered to defend the new Republic of Lithuania 100 years ago and went on during the Holocaust to save 16 people; read about life and death of Jonas Paulavičius


Ruta Bloshtein issues challenge to US taxpayer funded commission (“USCPAHA”) that is supposed to preserve foreign minority cemeteries; her international petition reaches the 45,000 signature mark

New York’s Daily News covers the “Save the Cemetery” movement led by Dov Fried; Israel’s interior minister weighs in 


Sam Sokol’s new paper on Israeli policy toward Holocaust history appears in Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs. Related: Matti Friedman’s New York Times op-ed on the politicization of Yad Vashem. Cf. Danny Ben-Moshe’s earlier op-ed in Jerusalem Report. See Defending History’s Yad Vashem section and the Israel Chronicle page.


13 January 2019

Major Holocaust History Trial in Vilnius on Jan. 15th

Come and Join the Defending History team that will monitor the major Holocaust history trial scheduled  in Vilnius for the 15th of January 2019

Almost 7 years after Evaldas Balčiūnas brought the case of Jonas Noreika to the English speaking world. Balčiūnas, for whom the Noreika saga but was one of many instances of his country glorifying Holocaust collaborators, wrote a series of articles that led to years of prosecution and police harassment (see his DH section, scroll down to  May 2014 for the saga of the legal proceedings against him). Evaldas, who contributed research to the current trial, will be on hand at the January 15th event in central Vilnius. Come and meet Evaldas.

TUESDAY 15 JANUARY 2019 AT  10 AM AT VILNIUS REGIONAL ADMINISTRATIVE COURT, ŽYGIMANTŲ ST. 2 IN CENTRAL VILNIUS

In advance of the trial, Identity Films has made its 2012 documentary, Rewriting History, available free online.

Richard Bloom Productions has released a revised version of its 2013 documentary, Defending Holocaust History.

MORE ON THE JANUARY 15TH VILNIUS TRIAL


13 December 2019

Ukraine: Where the Israeli Ambassador Stands Up for Simple Truth About the Holocaust

Ambassador Joel Lion

See reports on HE Ambassador Joel Lion’s public stance in:  The Times of Israel  &  Kyiv Post. A “day and night contrast” with embassy in Lithuania?  Just different ambassadors, or a different Foreign Ministry policy?

RELATED:  Matti Friedman’s New York Times op-ed on the politicization of Yad Vashem. Cf. Danny Ben-Moshe’s earlier op-ed in Jerusalem Report. See Defending History’s Yad Vashem section for the record of its radical shifts of position over the last decade.


12 December 2019

Oykh mir a konvenshon tsenter!

Don’t Lithuanian citizens deserve a sparkling new convention center where they will be welcomed by leaders of the arts, entertainment, industry and statecraft, not by the ghosts of the thousands of Vilna Jewish citizens who lie buried on all four sides, in the city’s Old Jewish Cemetery, where their families purchased their burial plots in perpetuity? 

by VULOVAK for Defending History

Or, you can try the English version, but with the classic Litvak Yiddish ironic intonation:

This is what you call a convention center ?!?


5 December 2018

Happy Hanukkah

to our readers who celebrate Hanukkah

Everyone welcome at a lecture by DH editor Prof. Dovid Katz on

“Past, Present & Future of the Litvaks”

hosted by the Vilnius Jewish Community, this Thursday 6 Dec. 2018 at 6 PM at the Jewish Cultural and Information Center at Mėsinių 3 in Vilnius Old Town.


21 November 2018

Two New Yorkers Take Federal “USCPAHA” Agency to Court in Washington DC

USCPAHA”, funded by US taxpayers to preserve and protect threatened cemeteries abroad, has for years allegedly colluded with those seeking to site a national convention center complex in the heart of the old Vilna Jewish cemetery. Now they are being taken to courtUpdates. International petition.


20 November 2018

Riga’s Rabbi Kalev Krelin Courageously Documents Prominent Swastikas at Latvia’s Independence Day Festivities

Original post deleted by Facebook…


18 November 2018

 Under Pressure of Israel’s Foreign Ministry?

Vilnius Genocide Center: “Legitimized” by 19 Nov. Yad Vashem Conference in Jerusalem?

OUR REPORT          COMMENT BY GERSHON TAITZ


11 November 2018

Poland’s 100th Anniversary Celebration in Central Warsaw is Ruined by Far Right Government’s Decision to Include (and Flaunt) Neo-Nazis and Assorted Bigots

Foreign neo-Nazis turned up. European leaders stayed away.

But the day had its heroes; Warsaw mayor Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz’s attempt to ban the neo-Nazi march on independence day in the capital’s center brought honor to Warsaw and its historic legacy of standing up to fascism

Reports in the Guardian; Haaretz; Hope Not HateEuropean Interest; New York TimesWall Street Journal


5 November 2018

“BELIEVE IT OR NOT”

Lithuania’s State Sponsored “Genocide Center” Goes to Court to Defend Legacy of Notorious Holocaust Collaborator


1 November 2018

Member of Lithuanian Gov’s “Red-Brown Commission” Teams Up with Ruta Vanagaite, Best-Selling Author, in Crowdfunding Campaign for a New Book


21 October 2018

How did Lithuania’s Foreign Minister End Up Together with Defending History’s Editor in Hit Job by Nation’s Top Neo-Nazi Blogger?

“By doing the right thing, and calling for the removal of a central Vilnius plaque that honors a brutal Nazi collaborator”

LATEST ADDITION TO THE SERIES “OUR EDITOR IN THE NEO-NAZI IMAGINATION”

See also selection of the racist, homophobic, and misogynist output of a Baltic nation’s far-right blogger who is said to be an official in the Economy Ministry

SEE FULL REPORT


10 October 2018

Vilnius Says Farewell to

Jacob Piliansky

Courageous Truth Teller and Gifted Wood Sculptor


5 October 2018

Evaldas Balčiūnas, Bold Lithuanian Author Who Exposed Slew of State Honors for Holocaust Collaborators, Releases Outline of New Play on Museum in Sheduva


30 September 2018

Did Fareed Zakaria Omit One Important Question in CNN Interview with Ukraine’s President?


28 September 2018

Real News Network Interviews DH Editor

Topics covered in the interview include East European glorification of Holocaust collaborators, criminalization and delegitimization of dissent, investment in the rise and export of “Double Genocide” Holocaust revisionism and the failure of the US and its allies to stand up for Western values in the current geopolitical context.


26 September 2018

Ukraine’s State-Sponsored “Azov Battalion” Posts Fascist Inspired Images on Its Own Website 

Will NATO, US and Ukraine’s Genuine Friends Publicly Comment?


23 September 2018

Lithuania’s Sept. 23rd Holocaust Remembrance Day, Marked by Annual Ponár Ceremony and Pope Francis’s Visit to Vilnius Old Town Ghetto Memorial

Defending History’s Eyewitness Report

IMAGE OF THE DAY: Elected chairperson of the Vilnius Jewish Community, Simon Gurevich, was not allowed past the security barrier, barring him from the Pope’s event to commemorate the Vilna Ghetto. At the earlier event at Ponár, he was not allowed to deliver his prepared remarks. 


22 September 2018

Andrius Kulikauskas asks:

Can Pope Francis, in Vilnius, Heal the Blind at Lukiškės Square?


21 September 2018

JTA REPORT ON DEFENDING HISTORY’S APPEAL TO POPE FRANCIS ON EVE OF VILNIUS VISIT

“Please ask for a reprieve for the Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery. A better site can be found for a sparkling new national convention center that the people of Vilnius so deserve. This is about equal human rights. A five-hundred year old Christian cemetery where thousands lie buried would not be the choice for siting a convention center.”

ALSO IN THE TIMES OF ISRAEL

The Choice at Hand?

OR


September 2018

ANDREW HIGGINS IN THE NEW YORK TIMES

Earlier NYT Report by Rod Nordland

On issues raised in the article:

State glorification of Holocaust perpetrator J. Noreika. More street names. More glorification. See Evaldas Balciunas section (scroll to May 2014 for start of the legal action against him for pleading with the state to stop honoring Noreika and multiple other Holocaust perpetrators). Have state agencies targeted other “Holocaust dissidents” for reprisals?

Cast in stone? Glorified among honorable martyrs on the outside wall of the Genocide Museum, on capital’s main boulevard

Is the Noreika saga a freshly exposed tip of the vast Double Genocide movement that glorifies collaborators and defames survivors in the interests of “equalizing” Nazi and Soviet crimes? View of the executive director of Lithuania’s lavishly sponsored state commission on the subject. Summary of Double Genocide. Critique by former Yad Vashem director Yitzhak Arad.

Can we accept at face value Netanyahu’s praises for Lithuanian gov. Holocaust policies? See Israel page. Did Israel’s ambassador to Lithuania define a lowpoint in the history of Israeli diplomacy?

————

Times article features Vilna born Holocaust survivor Prof. Pinchos Fridberg. See DH’s Fridberg section, and his 2014 Person of the Year citation. He has been the subject of personal attack by the state’s “red-brown commission”. In the Jewish world he is perhaps best known for his heartfelt plea in Yiddish, begging the director of New York’s YIVO to disentangle YIVO from the commission and Holocaust revisionism (English translation). At the height of the Rachel Margolis saga, YIVO would not reach out to her, while heaping honors on a gov. official whom the local Jewish community formally accused of antisemitism. Prof. Fridberg was also one of the first members of the Lithuanian Jewish community to publicly protest plans to plonk a national convention center in the middle of the old Jewish cemetery. Today there is an international petition signed by 44,400.  Photo: Defending History.


September 2018

Eva S. Balogh on Hungary’s Plans for New Holocaust Museum;

Rory Yeomans on history fixing in Croatia and Ukraine

Ukraine’s new children’s game glorifying fascist organization complicit in the Holocaust

Anne Applebaum on far-right takeovers in Poland & Hungary (in the Atlantic)


8 September 2018

Some Jewish Organizations in Hungary Pull Out of Holocaust Museum Project Led by Double Genociders

OTHERS RUSH IN TO FILL VOID, SEEKING GOV. FAVOR; CHABAD GIVEN OWNERSHIP OF MUSEUM!

Analysis by Eva S. Balogh

A plot line familiar across Eastern Europe: State investment in Holocaust commemoration, education, research (plus Jewish, Judaic and Yiddish PR toys), all in the spirit of far-right nationalist history revisionism bent on “equalizing” Nazi and Soviet crimes (and glorifying Nazi collaborators as “anti-Soviet heroes” in the process). For background see: on Holocaust museums in the region; on recent history of Holocaust studies in Lithuania.

On linkage of the specific East European brand of antisemitism to the Double Genocide movement, see new papers by Michael Shafir and Dovid Katz.

The European  “Double Genocide Debate” continues to be framed by the 2008 Prague Declaration (PD) and the response: the 2012 Seventy Years Declaration (SYD).


6 September 2018

To our Readers who Celebrate the Jewish New Year (5779)

אַ געזונט געבענטשט יאָר און אַ גמר חתימה טובה!

Jewish New Year’s gift from Kaunas artist and caricaturist Vulovakas:

By Vulovakas of Kaunas. Lithuanian text. Yiddish text.


1 September 2018

NEW PAPERS:

Michael Shafir: “The Nature of Postcommunist Antisemitism in East Central Europe: Ideology’s Backdoor Return”   

Sam Sokol: “The Butchering of History in Postrevolutionary Ukraine”

Dovid Katz:  “The Baltic Movement to Obfuscate the Holocaust” and “Primary Holocaust Inversion and East European Antisemitism”  (+ more papers)


26 August 2018

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s 23-26 Aug. Visit to Vilnius, Lithuania

Ben Cohen’s Coverage  in Algemeiner.com Cites Three Defending History Suggestions for the “Lithuanian-Israeli Moral Agenda”

(1) Call for letters of apology for three Israeli citizens defamed for posterity by Vilnius prosecutors: Yitzhak Arad (b. 1926) and Rachel Margolis (1921–2015) and Joseph Melamed (1924–2017). All three fought with the Jewish partisans against the Nazis. Two of the three were decorated heroes of Israel’s 1948 War of Independence.

(2) Call for rapid removal of street names and plaques that glorify Holocaust collaborators.

(3) Call for moving national convention center project away from the Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery (international petition tops 44,000).

___

Wiesenthal Center’s Efraim Zuroff, writing in Jerusalem Post, critiques Israel’s ambassador in Lithuania for helping state honor an alleged Holocaust collaborator (DH background here). Op-ed also notes employment difficulties imposed on author Ruta Vanagaite for telling historic truth (DH background on others who have suffered state’s wrath for speaking out). Zuroff goes on to tell JTA that Netanyahu’s praise for Lithuanian gov’s Holocaust policies is “sickening”; in the Jewish Press;  also cited by Herb Keinon in the Jerusalem Post; video interview on World Israel News.

SEE TIMES OF ISRAEL REPORT; SECOND REPORT; JTA; JERUSALEM POST; SEE DH’S ISRAEL CHRONICLE PAGE.

SEE MORE

IN THE NEWS:

Lev Golinkin in the Forward on US & Western Jewish leaders’ failure to speak out with moral clarity on East European state adulation of Nazi collaborators and attempts at revisionism via laws that criminalize free speech & Western narrative of World War II

European Reporter swallows Double Genocide & Holocaust Envy; 23rd August can be the day for remembering Communist crimes without the far right’s “equals sign”. Again, the “Prague Platform” is at work


3 August 2018

Leaders of Official Lithuanian Jewish Community Finally Join Call for Removal of Vilnius City Center Plaque Honoring a Brutal Holocaust Perpetrator

Six Years after Evaldas Balčiūnas’s 2012 plea on the pages of Defending HistoryLithuanian Jewish Community finally calls on government to remove plaque glorifying Holocaust perpetrator Jonas Noreika. Recent courageous essay by Noreika’s granddaughter, Silvia Foti, apparently played key role. JTA report. Andrius Kulikauskas reports on Grant Gochin’s appeal to Vilnius’s “Genocide Center” and the center’s response.

But beloved Holocaust survivor Prof. Pinchos Fridberg notes that “taking down one plaque” is not the solution (See also: Pinchos Fridberg section). 

As “reward” for his years of pleading with the Lithuanian gov. to stop glorifying Nazi collaborators, DH staff writer Evaldas Balčiūnas was harassed by police, prosecutors and far-right “plaintiffs” for years. See his DH section. Please scroll down to May 2014 to follow the ins-and-outs of the case

Jada Yuan in the New York Times cites Defending History’s work on the Vilnius museum that changed its name but continues to glorify 1941 Holocaust collaborators

Hungarian government’s pro-Israel, antisemitic politics (Anshel Pfeffer in Haaretz)

Council of Europe on neo-fascism in Croatia; Wiesenthal Center exposes inclusion of pro-fascist singer in Croatian football team celebration; Efraim Zuroff follows up with tale of two recent events in Croatia, also critiques Israeli Air Force show in Croatia as “shameful episode”

Sam Sokol in the Jewish Chronicle on glorification of Nazi war criminals in Ukraine; Issue cited in Washington Post coverage of Facebook Holocaust Denial scandal; Arutz Sheva reports: Ukraine’s president announces new official army greetings based on practice of World War II Hitlerist militias.

How will Romania deal with its Holocaust past? 


Late July 2018

 Inspired and courageous essay by Silvia Foti, granddaughter of Holocaust collaborator J. Noreika; 

New tribute to Lithuania’s righteous rescuers who risked all to just save a neighbor;

Three US senators appeal to Lithuania’s president to spare Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery;

Herbert Block breaks silence; Paul Packer, head of US Gov’s taxpayer-funded commission on “Heritage Abroad” concludes visit to Vilnius — statement awaited. Dr. Andrius Kulikauskas warns of business consequences for “cemetery convention center” while prime minister’s office refuses to receive Ruta Bloshtein, Vilnius-born, Vilnius-resident author of petition. Meanwhile, London’s “CPJCE Grave-Dealing Rabbis” under “Serious Incident” investigation over Vilnius at the UK’s Charity Commission. Discovery of 2015 video is shock to many.


July 2018

Lev Golinkin in Foreign Policy on Ukraine’s “approved” fascist chants (covered also by Haaretz); Its Parliament honors Nazi collaborators; But info missing from their English web page

Andrew Srulevitch of ADL slams Nazi slogans in state-approved Lviv parade

Canadian B’nai Brith appeals to Prime Minister Trudeau to stand up to Latvian glorification of Nazi collaborators; National Post reports; Hill Times asks if PM raised these issues in Riga

Rafał Pankowski in Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs on

The Resurgence of Antisemitic Discourse in Poland

Cnaan Liphshiz in JTA:

Estonian Jewish Community Protests Plaque Honoring Country’s Hitlerist Waffen SS

and

Ukrainian General’s Zoological Antisemitism


June 2018

The Rights of Minority Cemeteries to be Left in Peace are Human Rights

All the more so in post-Holocaust era Eastern Europe where there are no descendants to stand up

But, in “a story for George Orwell,” greedy commercial buildings are going up in one cemetery after another, with the blessings (and boasts of “success”) from wheeler-dealer rabbis and community leaders who “negotiate a memorial to the cemetery” and some ersatz stamp of  “Jewish approval” (sometimes complete with sham “reburial-of-bones” ceremonies and PR declaration of “success”). Often this takes place with collusion from  London’s CPJCE and the US taxpayer funded USCPAHA whose members sometimes claim to be “pressured by the State Department’s policy of Our East European Allies Never Make Mistakes”. The scandal-ridden agency is sometimes called Washington’s most corrupt federal entity.

This month’s state of affairs at the famous Gwarna Jewish Cemetery in Wroclaw, in western Poland, where the new Best Western hotel nears completion.  The last on-site issue is the land adjacent to the hotel: restored cemetery or still more exhumations with sham blessings? (parent chain and local operators).  Who’d choose to stay in this hotel? And where in all this is Poland’s National Heritage Law?

This is what they call “saving Jewish Cemeteries in Europe”?

Wroclaw, Poland: Is this how American-born rabbis, London’s CPJCE and the US taxpayer funded USCPAHA “save Jewish cemeteries” in Eastern Europe?

The Defending History community congratulates Agnieszka Jablonska, a Judaic Studies scholar in Wroclaw, Poland, on her courageous reply to the official chief rabbi’s disappointing response to her earlier historic article in Tablet on the fate of the Gwarna Cemetery  now nearing completion as a station-side Best Western chain hotel.

See Defending History’s August 2017 report on the Gwarna Cemetery situation, a follow-up providing first publication of Ms. Jablonska’s full report in DH, and her Tablet essay.

It is important to investigate whether or not the Poland issues over the years are related to the allegedly corrupt London based “CPJCE” who were caught red-handed in a Wikileaks cable demanding secret payments for “supervision”  in Vilnius, Lithuania,  resulting in building and commercialization (Wikileaks, 2015 reports in JTA, JP, ToI, DH). They are now under investigation by the UK Charity Commission. International petition on the old Vilna Jewish cemetery (44,000 signatures), worldwide opposition, recently discovered video.


23 June 2018

With “extraordinary insensitivity” Vilnius Municipality again endorses Old Town motorcycle gala to celebrate June 23rd, day the Lithuanian Holocaust broke out (initiated by the LAF “heroes” being celebrated)

See Section on June 23rd; LAF; Their leaflets before the war; Videos of survivor memories of the week of 23 June 1941; Glorification of the LAF; of collaborators in Eastern Europe

The Defending History community continues to salute Dr. Valentinas Brandišauskas for his classic rebuttal of A. Liekis’s attempts to glorify the LAF and make its massacres into the basis for a national holiday

EYEWITNESS REPORT


21 June 2018

Pleading for the Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery

Defending History authors Ruta Bloshtein and Julius Norwilla flank Vilnius’s Rabbi S. J. Feffer, a leading international specialist on the Gaon of Vilna, after a Vilnius City Hall meeting at which they presented the international petition (44,000 signatures), Lithuanian translations of major articles, and a roster of opposition. They also informed officials that the one group of allegedly corrupt London rabbis (the CPJCE) who “gleefully ‘sold’ other people’s graves to the prime minister” was now under investigation, precisely over Vilnius, by the UK Charity Commission’s Serious Incident office.

EYEWITNESS REPORT


May 2018

EASTERN EUROPE GRAPPLES WITH FAR-RIGHT HISTORY REVISIONISM AND THREATS TO FREE SPEECH

LATVIA: Canadian military magazine Esprit de Corps (On Target) replies to Latvian ambassador’s acrobatics on worship of Waffen SS (see Scott Taylor’s earlier article. From archives: Monica Lowenberg takes on Latvian ambassador in London in 2012 and in 2013).

LITHUANIA: Joanna Plucinska in Politico on Lithuania’s proposed new law banning “harmful” books; Chronicle of a 10 year assault on freedom of speech on Holocaust history.

POLAND: Rafal Pankowski, in BICSA’s annual Robert Wistrich Lecture in Berlin, analyzes antisemitism in Poland in 2018.

UKRAINE: Josh Cohen in Kyiv Post: Ukraine’s far-right violence is not Russian propaganda” (see his earlier report); Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty on state funding for neo-Nazis under banner of “patriotic education” (Also in Human Rights). Human Rights Watch addresses government. FreedomHouse.org on how far-right extremism threatens Ukrainian democracy. Also: new debate in Canada on monument to fascist leader, and, over welcome for alleged far-right leader by the Scottish Parliament.

“Not Just About Eastern Europe”

See the export of efforts to rewrite history to Belgium, CanadaIsrael, South Africa, UK, USA, and many other countries

Meantime, Prague Declaration efforts are being revived in the European Parliament in 2018. In 2012, Defending History was proud to co-author the Seventy Years Declaration, boldly signed by eight Lithuanian parliamentarians.

Latest 2018 harbinger of “Double Genocide” revisionism personally attacks authors Efraim Zuroff and Ruta Vanagaite, while offering saccharin red-brown PR at the European Parliament in Strasbourg. She is assistant to a member of parliament who was formerly deputy chairman of the now-defunct “National Democrats Party” (Neo-Nazis).

FROM OUR TEAM IN VILNIUS:

Sources in London: Solicitors instructed by international group whose ancestors are buried in the Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery to take legal action against the CPJCE with “court action to be announced by the end of July 2018”

Dramatic Youtube video: Shocking scene of CPJCE-ers  allegedly coming to “sell” the prime minister of Lithuania the old Vilna Jewish cemetery as grounds for a new convention center. International opposition to the convention center project is mounting by the day. Ruta Bloshtein’s international petition tops 43,500 signatures. Her latest update

Jewish Chronicle: Ruta Vanagaite honored in Brussels by Conference of European Rabbis for telling the simple truth about the Lithuanian Holocaust (only to have her books effectively banned in Lithuania: after Oct. 2017 diatribe by major politician, publisher pulled all  her books from bookstore and internet sales)

JTA on the Lithuanian Jewish community’s valiant call for democracy and honest elections. Eyewitness report on 28 May 2018 demonstration

Vilnius Marks Birthdays of Three of its Extraordinary Jewish Figures:

Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky (96)

Milan Chersonski (80)

Pinchos Fridberg (80)


May 2018

KEEPING TRACK

LEV GOLINKIN IN THE FORWARD ON SHOCKING ANTISEMITISM IN UKRAINE; HIS INTERVIEW WITH ABC’S JOHN BATCHELORMORE FROM UKRAINE

AND FROM NEW BRITAIN, CONNECTICUT

CONGRATULATIONS TO RUTA VANAGAITE ON AWARD FROM THE CONFERENCE OF EUROPEAN RABBIS IN BRUSSELS

JULIUS NORWILLA’S NEW POSTER EXHIBIT ON THE OLD VILNA JEWISH CEMETERY

SENSATIONAL 2015 VIDEO NOW ON YOU TUBE

Did London “CPJCE” Rabbis Come to Vilnius to “Permit” A Convention Center in the Heart of City’s Old Jewish Cemetery in Defiance of All Major Rabbis on the Planet (Plus Those in Vilnius…)

The incredible story. When their spokesman “explained” to the media that a derelict, hated, Soviet-era ruin now on the cemetery is the “Tower of London and Statue of Liberty” to the Lithuanian people.  Why this zealous attachment to desecration of a sacred Jewish cemetery in Vilna? What does the rest of the world think? Ms. Ruta Bloshtein, a religious Jewish woman in Vilnius started a petition. It’s now approaching 44,000 signatures. See her LATEST UPDATE (MAY 2018).

The London CPJCE has since been exposed by Wikileaks, and in reports in the Jerusalem PostJTA, and Times of Israel, for taking secret payments for their clandestine, acquiescent agreement. What happened to transparency? Most recently, the elected head of the Vilnius Jewish Community has spoken out forcefully in the New York Times.

Are they abusing a venerable rabbi in his late 90s for these schemes?

London CPJCE Rabbis, including Rabbi Herschel Gluck OBE, come to offer gleeful permissions for a new convention center and massive annex in the heart of the old Vilna Jewish cemetery in April 2015. On the video, they meet with the nation’s then prime minister who cannot contain his own glee (and who told the press how surprised he was that it was “so easy”). The three resident Vilnius rabbis in town that day were not even informed of the meeting; the country’s then chief rabbi was then fired for daring to disagree with the Londoners’ “permission”.  All other rabbis on the planet, including the greatest yeshiva heads in the Lithuanian tradition, have begged the government to move the convention center elsewhere and restore the medieval Jewish cemetery where thousands still lie buried


Lev Golinkin in the LA Times:

US Jewish Leaders Outspoken on Mideast, but Shrink from Discussing East European Antisemitism and Holocaust Denial


City Council of New Britain, Connecticut Passes Resolution Cancelling Plans for Monument Honoring Alleged Nazi Collaborator;  The Timeline


From Vilnius, Ruta Bloshtein updates her 43,000 petition signers on the fate of the Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery at Piramónt, calling on signers to contact the Charities Commission in the UK. If it were a non-Jewish cemetery, the government would not be building a national convention center over the remains of thousands of Vilna citizens whose families purchased their final resting places in perpetuity.


April 2018

“Amazing Berliners” Open their Homes First Weekend in May to Remember “Those who Once Lived Here” (FT Report)

Hopes Rising that East European Cities will Follow

 57 US Congressman Condemn Holocaust Distortion in Ukraine and Poland & Laws Criminalizing Free Speech on Topic

DH’s Report;   PDF of the Letter;   Sam Sokol in Open Democracy; Dovid Katz in Jewish Currents: “But Poland’s law is not the worst”;   JTA report cites Defending History’s decade of work documenting East European governmental distortion of history.


April 2018
OUR ISSUES IN THE NEWS

Montreal’s Holocaust Museum postpones exhibit on heroic Polish resistance hero Jan Karski in wake of current Polish issues

Three Nazi flags hoisted on Vilnius bridges on Hitler’s April 20 birthday; Official Jewish community reacts

Rabbi Dan Fink of Boise, Idaho, year after visit to Lithuania, still shocked at behavior of local Catholic Church during the Holocaust; Yitzhak Arad’s historical summary

Dovid Katz’s take on Vilnius’s “Genocide Museum” in TabletRecent New York Times news report on museum’s continuing capacity for shocking visitors to Lithuania’s capital

JTA on opposition to Riga’s annual Waffen SS glorification march, including, this year, one Riga woman’s inspiring vigil to remember Holocaust victims; But article omits many years of effective work by one London woman, whose international petition (and blog) reached thousands; she dialogued with Latvia’s embassy in London, and the UK Foreign Ministry leading to notable revelations regarding actual policies of EU/NATO states toward East European glorification of Nazi collaborators.

 Christian Science Monitor’s Harry Bruinius covers nationalist based state antisemitism in Hungary

Brussels, and firm of eminent London architects roped into new “red=brown” Double Genocide project sponsored by East European far right’s “Prague Platform”?

HOPEFULLY THEY WILL LOOK AT EXACTLY WHAT’S BEHIND THIS PROJECT AND JUST SAY NO


April 2018

“It Always Pays to Stand Up and Defend History”

Elected Leaders of New Britain, Connecticut Cancel Lithuanian Gov. Project to Plonk a Monument to an Alleged 1941 Holocaust Collaborator on Public Land

“MAJOR SUCCESS” IN EFFORTS TO HALT THE EXPORT OF “DOUBLE GENOCIDE” HISTORY REVISIONISM TO THE WEST

Hero of the saga is City Council alderman Professor Aram Ayalon. His petition and active contacts with colleagues internationally brought rapid results

Professor Aram Ayalon, alderman on the city council of New Britain, Connecticut

New Britain Progressive report cites DH role.

Defending History broke the news first, on 14 January 2018.

Chronicle of a saga: DH’s section on New Britain.

Major documents include essays by a leading Lithuanian ethicist, Evaldas Balčiūnas (2014 and 2017) on the alleged 1941 perpetrator for whom a massive monument was slated for a “separate square” right near New Britain’s beloved Museum of American Art. Most council members were not even aware of the secretive plan, while proposed Lithuanian government financing was guaranteed, even as inquirers were told it was a local church that was the sponsor. The project was managed by the Lithuanian Consulate in New York.

Justin Dorsey  at the New Britain mayor’s office: “There will be no monument recognizing this individual.”

 


1 April 2018

New York Times covers history debates that rage on in Eastern Europe; Haaretz publishes Hebrew translation; Targum Shlishi reposts its recent report; Oxford Review of Books interviews DH editor. In Germany’s Jungle World.

Will New Britain, Connecticut really allow a public monument to an alleged Nazi collaborator? City Council member Professor Aram Ayalon launches petition; Latest. Will Mayor Erin E. Stewart break her silence with some rapid words of simple moral clarity? This is even worse than Charlottesville: It’s about putting up a new monument for an alleged Nazi collaborator on public land in Connecticut. Where’s leadership? See DH’s new section on New Britain, ConnecticutThis is not a “Lithuanian-Jewish issue”; One of Lithuania’s leading ethicists, Evaldas Balčiūnas leads the way for people of good will in his 2014 and 2017 essays on the figure for whom the New Britain monument is planned.

42,500 sign petition by Ruta Bloshtein of Vilnius, begging Lithuanian government to move national convention center project away from Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery; Please consider signing!

FROM THE LAST DECADE:

Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian (2009); Avi Friedman in Mishpacha, Ricky Ben-David in the Jerusalem Post, Mark Ames in The Nation, and Wendy Robbins on BBC World Service (2010); Cindy Mindell in the Jewish Ledger (2011); Danny Ben-Moshe in his film Rewriting History (2012); Bernard Dichek in Jerusalem Report (2013); Richard Bloom in his film Defending Holocaust History (2014); Daniel Brook in Slate (2015); Larry Yudelson in Jewish Standard (2016); Rod Nordland in The New York Times (2018)

Poland has been rightly criticized for a 2018 law criminalizing free speech about the Holocaust but other countries have passed rather worse laws, including Hungary (2010), Lithuania (2010), Estonia (2012), Latvia (2014) and Ukraine (2015). People have lost their employment and been pursued by authorities, via prosecutors or just campaigns of defamation, for speaking outApril 3rd update: Lithuania’s economy minister (!) proposes law banning books on history the government doesn’t like.

Did the Israeli Foreign Ministry really decide to compromise Holocaust history or was this a fluke of one hapless embassy?

Will New York’s YIVO Institute finally stop legitimizing Lithuanian Double Genocide industry’s far right Red-Brown Commission which just held a conference honoring an alleged Holocaust collaborator?

Honoring Lithuania’s 100th Birthday

With an exhibit on nation’s interwar harmonious multiculturalism, and celebration of one of the 1918 independence war’s great heroes. Some of Lithuania’s most inspiring truth tellers today are DH regulars, including Evaldas Balciunas, Andrius Kulikauskas, and Julius Norwilla. Many more over the years.

Defending History was the only human rights group in Lithuania to monitor the recent neo-Nazi marches in central Vilnius, on nation’s 16 February and 11 March independence days. We do it every year.

What is it all about? The grand debate over Holocaust history and its “European declarations”: The Prague Declaration and Defending History’s response — Seventy Years Declaration (SYD)

Are famous Jewish personalities from the West becoming fellow travelers of the new Holocaust revisionism when blinded by medals, honors, photo-ops with politicians, junkets, and grants?

Will Indiana University’s Borns Jewish Studies Program in Bloomington forever prop up a hijacked Yiddish institute in faraway Vilnius that serves to promote Holocaust revisionism?


29 March 2018

DH NEWS FEED

Vilnius goodwill: Rabbi S. J. Feffer, a leading campaigner for saving Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery, invites “the whole city — people of any religion and none” to his free Passover séyder, Friday 30 March 8:30 PM at the Narutis Hotel in Vilnius. “No tickets, no registration, just come!”

Paul Simon interviews Dovid Katz on Double Genocide, history revisionism, and Germany’s “quiet role”

Ukraine’s far-right OUN launches campaign against Babi Yar Holocaust museum project

Vilnius: Simon Gurevich (Gurevičius), elected leader of Vilnius Jewish Community, blasts fake-election ersatz LJC leaders, calls for rapid new & transparent elections

27 March 2018 marked the fourth yórtsayt (death anniversary) of

Dr. Shimon Alperovich

Visionary leader of the Jewish Community of Lithuania who treated every human being with the highest respect and dignity. He also spoke out with integrity, courage and moral clarity on Jewish values, Holocaust revisionism, Double Genocide, the campaign to defame Jewish partisan heroes, and state projects to glorify the collaborators.

Efraim Zuroff in the Jerusalem Post on Holocaust distortion in Eastern Europe

Cnaan Lifshiz’s JTA report on Waffen SS march in central Riga


11 March 2018

Defending History Monitors the March 11th Neo-Nazi March in Central Vilnius

Celebrating Lithuania’s independence and success and also, as each year, monitoring the neo-Nazi march for which the center of Vilnius is gifted (on this of all days). See our eyewitness report. Defending History’s reports from the last decade of marches marches in Vilnius, Kaunas, and Riga.


OTHER EVENTS IN VILNIUS AND RIGA IN THE WEEK OF 11 MARCH 2018


RECENT REPORTS

Lithuanian government’s “Red-Brown Commission,” a prime engine of Prague Declaration “Double Genocide” politics, boasts of conference honoring alleged 1941 Holocaust collaborator.

———

Forgotten Yiddish poem by Jewish partisan poet Hirsh Glik, whose Zog nit keynmol became the partisan hymn.

———

New voices rise up on the humiliation, destruction and commercialization of East European Jewish cemeteries: Israel’s chief rabbi and rabbi of nation’s holy sites plead with Lithuanian president on the old Jewish cemetery at Piramónt (Šnipiškės). And, from Wroclaw, Poland, the voice of a young Polish scholar, Angieszka Jablonska documents similar events , in DH, and now in Tablet magazine in the US. The days of the London-based “CPJCE” representing themselves as saving these cemeteries are coming to an end.  Jewish cemeteries on ground zero of the Holocaust must, as a matter of human rights, be treated with the same dignity as Christian and other burial sites.


March 2015

It’s Baltic Marching Season Time…

The Defending History community protests the annual “Baltic Marching Season” in which states and major cities gift their most prestigious city centers for pro-Nazi marches that brim with racism and ethnic hatred, sometimes on cherished national holidays. Where are the local voices of dissent? The lavishly financed human rights monitoring organizations? Western voices? A media that reports?

Vilnius, 16 February 2018

Tallinn, 24 February 2018

Vilnius (/Kaunas?), 11 March 2018

Riga, 16 March 2018


28 February – March 2018

TO OUR READERS WHO CELEBRATE PURIM:

A HAPPY PURIM! (28 Feb — 1 March 2018)

WELCOME TO A NEW TRANSLATION OF THE BOOK OF ESTHER INTO LITHUANIAN YIDDISH…  AND TO A DIALECT MAP OF THE NAME FOR THE BELOVED PURIM PASTRY RECALLED BY THE LAST YIDDISH SPEAKING HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS IN NORTHEASTERN EUROPE


16 February 2018

Lithuania Celebrates its 100th in February 2018 

HAPPY BIRTHDAY LITHUANIA!


January-February 2018

Volha Charnysh and Evgeny Finkel on Rewriting History in Eastern Europe (in Foreign Affairs)

Lev Golinkin on Holocaust Deceptions in Ukraine and Beyond (in the New York Times) 

Josh Cohen on Ukraine’s Holocaust Manipulations (in The National Interest)

Dovid Katz on “Double Genocide” (in Jewish Currents), and the Manipulation of Holocaust Studies in Lithuania (in Dapim)

Cnaan Liphshiz (JTA) in the Jerusalem Post & Times of Israel

Israel Knesset Member Ksenia Svetlova in the Jerusalem Post; Also: All-time lowpoint of Israeli diplomacy?  See DH’s Israel Chronicle page and Israel Section

Clemens Heni on WDR German Radio

Evaldas Balčiūnas in Defending History (and the follow-on debate about New Britain, Connecticut)

London’s “CPJCE” Grave-Betraying Rabbis and the Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery

Is YIVO being manipulated to cover for ongoing East European Holocaust revisionism?

Defending History in Targum Shlishi


SOME “LOCAL” QUESTIONS FOR HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE DAY, 27 JANUARY 2018:

Does the Lithuanian government really want to name 2018 for an alleged Holocaust collaborator?

Does the city of New Britain, Connecticut really want to erect a monument for the same alleged collaborator?

Will the city of Kaunas, named Capital of European Culture for 2022, take rapid action to move away from city center the annual Feb. 16th independence day neo-Nazi parade that often glorifies actual local collaborators? Announcement of this year’s Feb 16th event.

So far, less than morally solid reactions from the American Jewish Committee and the Simon Wiesenthal Center; silence from ADL etc. Soon to be rectified?

BRAVO TO LIEBE GEFT: Breaking with American Jewish organizations’ timidity, Liebe Geft, head of the Wiesenthal Center’s Tolerance Museum in Los Angeles, critiques the Prague Declaration’s support for “Double Genocide” revisionism in run-up to Toronto conference to be held on 27-28 Jan. 2018; More on the (2008) Prague Declaration and Defending History’s response, the (2012) Seventy Years Declaration. What is Double Genocide? Has it been snuck into some Holocaust educational programs and museums? Our editor’s take. Danny Ben-Moshe’s documentary film Rewriting History

FALSIFIED HOLOCAUST PHOTO again used in Ukrainian media’s effort to manipulate history.

NEW BRITAIN, CONNECTICUT: Does this town really need a brand-new monument glorifying an alleged Holocaust collaborator?

CHIEF RABBI OF ISRAEL calls on president of Lithuania to cancel project of a convention center atop thousands of Jewish graves in Vilnius. International opposition continues to mount. Because of the Holocaust, these people have no descendants or relatives to protect their paid-for final resting place. Because of ongoing bias, Jewish burial sites in Eastern Europe are not treated with the same respect as others.

A ONCE-IN-A-CENTURY OPPORTUNITY FOR  KAUNAS (Kovno, Kóvne), Lithuania’s 2nd city, which has been named “Capital of European Culture” for 2022. Hopefully, the city’s leaders will act rapidly to honor Holocaust Remembrance Day on 27 January and to scrap the city center’s February 16th independence day neo-Nazi march starting this year, while taking down street signs and a Vytautas Magnus University lecture hall name that actually glorify Holocaust collaborators. In the meantime, the city’s tiny religious Jewish community has produced a medallion in Yiddish to honor the 200th anniversary of the birth of the city’s famed Rabbi Yitskhok Elkhonon Spector.


15-22 January 2018

Our Team Joins with Human Rights Advocates Everywhere to Celebrate

Martin Luther King Day

Martin Luther King Week 2018


1 January 2018

Malvina Šokelytė Valeikienė

Defending History’s 2018 Person of the Year

IN HONOR OF THE 100TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE MODERN LITHUANIAN STATE IN 1918

LEAD Technologies Inc. V1.01

READ MORE…


HAPPY NEW YEAR 2018 TO ALL OUR READERS!

Annual meditation from Ecclesiastes 3; in Lithuanian Yiddish


31 December 2017

Evaldas Balčiūnas asks:

Is it Really a Good Idea for Politicians to Name 2018 in Honor of Someone who Led a Pro-Nazi Squad during the Outbreak of the Lithuanian Holocaust in June-July 1941?

In a country with a grand thousand year legacy of innumerable true heroes, including those who established the modern democratic state in 1918? On the centenary of that incredible achievement? Editor’s take. DH’s centenary tribute. [JANUARY 2018 UPDATE: DH’s 2018 PERSON OF THE YEAR.]


28 December 2017

Democratically Elected Vilnius Jewish Community’s Council Calls for Clean, Fresh Elections for National Community’s Leadership

The democratically elected 21-member Council of the Vilnius Jewish Community (VJC) calls for new, free and fair elections for Lithuanian Jewish Community (LJC) leadership positions (English text here). The call follows the 21 Dec  2017 court ruling invalidating last spring’s “kangaroo elections” in which the thousands of living Jewish people were disenfranchised and replaced by a roomful of “board members”.  More background

UPDATES TO 29 DEC: JTA report appearing also in Arutz ShevaThe Times of IsraelTimes of Israel in French, Forward; see also: Isra.com

ALSO: Latest “Good Will Foundation” figures show New York’s Edward Blank Yivo Digitization Project again muscling in on the last assets intended for Lithuania’s current Jewish people from the plundered religious properties of the annihilated religious communities (as PDF). Has the community been polled on this or other major allocations? State’s “Red-Brown Commission” continues to boast of Yivo’s membership and support for gov. Holocaust policies. See Vilna Holocaust survivor’s heartfelt plea to director of Yivo. Is Edward Blank aware of what’s going on?


19 December 2017

What’s the Moral Legacy of those People “Behind” the Scattered Gravestones of Vilna?

Professor Sid Leiman tells the story of Vilnius citizen Abba-Menachem Kremerman, who died at 15 in 1939, and — the story of what happened to his gravestone in late 2017. The bizarre results of Vilnius authorities’ decision last month to dump 1000 Jewish gravestones from one cemetery onto the territory of another to deflect attention from international shock at plans for a national convention center in the “recipient” cemetery’s heart (with photos by Julius Norwilla)

Abba-Menachem Kremerman


Dovid Katz’s new paper on Holocaust Studies in Lithuania

New in Yiddish: Virtual Mini-Museum of Jewish Life in Interwar Lithuania


11 December 2017

US Government Rep Agrees with Defending History on Need for National Convention Center Project to be Moved Away from Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery

Head of the Committee on the Old Vilnius Jewish Cemetery for the US government’s Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad (USCPAHA), Herbert Block (left) with Defending History editor Dovid Katz after two Vilnius meetings in mid December 2017 resulted in full agreement on the need for the national convention center project to be moved away from the Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery at Piramónt (Šnipiškės). See report. Meanwhile, international consensus comes into focus with growing support within Lithuania, including its Jewish community.

Herbert and Dovid reach agreement

In the News in Dec. 2017

Israeli Foreign Ministry crosses “red Holocaust line” and offers PR support for Lithuanian parliament’s decision to name 2018 for alleged Holocaust collaboratorWeekly of Vilnius comments; Israeli ambassador’s Vilnius antics end in major fiasco

In major interview with Frankfurter Rundschau, Clemens Heni explains the part of Holocaust relativization in current European antisemitism; Notes vintage of the 2008 Prague Declaration

Danny Ben-Moshe’s documentary film Rewriting History on the Double Genocide movement and the ensuing conflicts and adventures in Lithuania and the European Union now available online for the first time

Vilnius District Court rules that official (gov. sponsored) “Lithuanian Jewish Community” elections of May 2017 were rigged; chairperson seems to cling to power on a dubious legal basis amid growing calls for clean new elections

Vilna Studies: Harvard University’s Leyzer Ran Catalog by Charles Berlin is now available online

Masha Gessen interviews Ruta Vanagaite in the New Yorker. PEN America protests ban on her books. Follow the saga (in English) with Defending History


8 December 2017

Josh Cohen’s Eyewitness Report: Vanagaite-Zuroff Event at Washington’s Wilson Center: Lithuanian Ambassador Publicly Accuses Vanagaite of Putinist Collusion

Meanwhile, in Vilnius, state sponsored Red-Brown Commission chief Ronaldas Račinskas attacks Vanagaite’s book and speaking tour (“lies about Lithuania’s past and present”).  In 2008, he started purge of Yiddish institute, now “led” by fellow Red-Brown Commission member. In 2013 he defamed prominent Holocaust survivor Prof. Pinchos Fridberg as “liar” for having corrected an error. Commission chief’s “classic” video formulation of Double Genocide in connection with defamed Jewish partisan veteran Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky. His denial of early LAF violence against Lithuanian Jewry in June 1941.


In November 2017

Wall of “Mainstream Media Hush-Up” for East European Glorification of Nazi Collaborators Begins to Crumble

Defending History was the first to get there”

Newsweek, following History News Network, exposes the BBC’s peddling of fake history of Ukrainian ultranationalism; for background see Josh Cohen in Foreign Policy in 2016

LA Times on America’s disturbing UN vote concerning condemnation of Nazi glorification; also in the Independent; for background see Dovid Katz in Times of Israel in 2014

Jan Gross in the New York Times on neo-fascism in PolandHaaretz on the situation in Poland

The National Interest on Lithuania’s persecution of Ruta Vanagaite and other recent East European episodes; PEN America’s public protest; for background see Defending History’s take

Ottawa Citizen on Ukrainian pro-Nazi monuments in Canada; see Defending History’s Canada section 

Lev Golinkin in The Hill on neo-nazism in today’s Ukraine


In the Late 2017 Battle of Ideas

Chona Leibovich (Leibovič), proud member of the Vilnius Jewish Community, writes with inspiring courage on the Nazi legacy of many “national-hero partisans” in Lithuania in major news portal Delfi.lt 

Dovid Katz in Dapim on the extraordinary recent history of Holocaust studies in Lithuania (PDF of proof only)

Alexandra Kudukis interviews Grant Gochin in I am Lietuva (International Lithuanian Federation) on the damage Lithuania’s leaders inflict on the country by  glorifying Holocaust collaborators via monuments, street names, and state accolades while deflecting questions with the trope that critics are “Russian lackeys”

Clemens Heni in The Times of Israel on the shocking new tendency of some Jewish groups to tolerate or support the American Alt Right and the European Far Right 

Julius Norwilla in DH on the latest farcical attempt to “memorialize” the old Vilna Jewish cemetery by shlepping some gravestones there for a “monument” — as lame diversion for plan underway to plonk a sparkling national convention center surrounded by thousands of Vilna Jewish graves

Andrius Kulikauskas in DH: Celebrations of the centenary of semiotician Algirdas Julius Greimas can include also a thought for his victims

Dovid Katz in Jewish Currents: Double Genocide  IS  the new Holocaust Denial

NEW SECTIONS IN LITHUANIAN AND IN RUSSIAN; NEW YIDDISH SECTION ON JEWISH CULTURE IN INTERWAR LITHUANIA IS LAUNCHED (SUPPLEMENT TO VILNA YIDDISH MINI-MUSEUM PROJECT)

FROM NEAR AND FAR IN NOV. 2017

Warsaw: Jan Gross in the New York Times on fascist manifestations in Poland

Berlin: A European journal on antisemitism that does not fear to tackle the East European Holocaust Obfuscation movement

Tel Aviv: Joe Melamed’s Shlóyshim came and went. But which of the Israeli “Litvak organizations” will be hosting a public event? Will the Israeli Embassy in Vilnius utter a solitary word, or is Melamed in the “Dov Levin” category? the Rachel Margolis category? Where is the Vilnius Israeli embassy’s loyalty to its own citizens?

Washington DC: Efraim Zuroff and Ruta Vanagaite will speak on 7 Dec. on “The Holocaust & Historical Memory Wars in Lithuania” at the Wilson Center’s Kennan Institute. Some background here, and here

Harvard: Harvard University releases catalogue of the Leyzer Ran Collection on old Jewish Vilna; Also: Dec 11th lecture by Efraim Zuroff and Ruta Vanagaite

Kiev: Senior Ukraine official hints at antisemitic violence if Jewish citizens disagree about glorification of alleged war criminals; Meanwhile, Minister for Infrastracture announces plan to actually build “the Road to Bandera” 

Vilnius: Another “Rigged antisemitism conference”?

Mariampole (Lithuania; Yiddish—Maryámpl, Márnpol): Day-long event to introduce people to Lithuanian Jewish culture on 28 Nov.

London: Annual “Litvak Days” charade to feature on 29 and 30 Nov.


2 November 2017

Trending in October 2017

Prague and Brussels

First shot fired in bizarre new battle for European history. Far-right “Prague Platform” (funded by EU taxpayers) charges that Brussels “House of European History” Plan has “Neo-Marxist message”

Latvia

In Riga, Latvia, court punishes an anti-Nazi demonstrator for his placard showing Nazi violence of 1941; he was a counter-demonstrator at this year’s Waffen-SS march. Now also in Jewish Currents (NY). See Latvia and Riga’s Waffen SS marches sections.

Ukraine

Ukraine’s President Proshenko abuses Holocaust photo on Twitter; Svoboda regional leader threatens Jewish citizens who may disagree with public honors for Ukrainian pogrom-meisters; Meantime, Infrastructure Minister announces plans for actually building a “Road to Bandera”

Ukrainian city, Kalush, names street in honor of Waffen-SS Hauptsturmführer; Bold citizen challenges the decision in court; JTA report; Also: WJC decries new monument in Vinnitsa for pogrom-meister Petliura

Radio Free Europe reports up to 20,000 participated in October 14th march in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev to glorify the UPA, a major fascist group that collaborated in the Holocaust; Nazi salutes documented

Israeli ambassador to Ukraine speaks out on repeated state honoring of major antisemitic figuresSeUkraine section.

Lithuania

Simon Gurevich (Simonas Gurevičius), elected head of Vilnius Jewish Community, calls on school in Šiauliai (Shavl) to reject a plan for it to be renamed in honor of Holocaust perpetrator Jonas Noreika. Reports in Lithuanian and Russian.

Lithuania’s prime minister says convention center on old Jewish cemetery will “lift” nation’s capital

Can a program to “help” a city’s Roma do more harm than good?

Linas Vildžiūnas, a leading intellectual in Lithuania, reviews Rūta Vanagaitė’s book on the Holocaust — his review now in English translation

Will a deeply disturbing “Litvak postage stamp” be withdrawn?

Professor Josifas Parisonas on need for democracy in Lithuanian Jewish Community. See Lithuania section.

Antisemitism Studies

Clemens Heni in Times of Israel on the specificity of antisemitism in light of “post-colonial studies”   

ISGAP’s Flashpoint series

 

29 October 2017

יוסף (יאָסקע) מלמד ז″ל

Melamed-alone-Nov-2011

Joe Melamed (1924-2017)

Greatest of the Litvak Champions, Joe Melamed, Dies at 93 in Tel Aviv. Litvak world in mourning as his inspiring life comes into sharper focus, not least his robust and courageous activism over his last decade. Update: Images from the last years.

 

21 October 2017

כאַסיע לאַנגבאָרד שפּאַנערפליג ע″ה

Chasia Shpanerflig

Chasia Langbord Shpanerflig (1921 — 2017)

Photo © DefendingHistory.com


NEW SECTIONS: “SYMBOLOGY”; ARTICLES IN LITHUANIAN ON THE OLD VILNA JEWISH CEMETERY; plus NEW COUNTRY SECTIONS: IRELAND; NORWAY


27 September 2017

A NEW FILM

Vilnius screening of The Last Sunday in August, major new documentary film on the Holocaust in Lithuania, focused on Malát (Molėtai) in eastern Lithuania, is so far  ignored by mainstream media and the “Double Genocide Industry”. To date: not one media outlet has published a review. The film documents the murder of all 2,000 Jews of the shtetl in one day (29 August 1941), entirely by enthusiastic, volunteer local murderers working for the German Nazi occupiers of their own country, who killed all of their own neighbors who were Jewish. There was not a single rescuer in the town (but there were incredibly brave Righteous in the surrounding countryside). It also documents those inspiringly courageous Lithuanian citizens today who are determined to tell the simple truth. Defending History calls on the film’s producers to make it very rapidly widely available. The film’s historic narrative and moral message are a precise opposite of the state-sponsored “International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes of Lithuania” (“red-brown commission”) that specializes in spewing moral confusion and doubletalk.

A NEW POSTAGE STAMP

Well-intentioned postage stamp honoring Litvaks goes disastrously wrong, incorporating a nationalist symbol which Holocaust survivors and Lithuanian Jews associate with Nazi and neo-Nazi usage, from the Holocaust to the present day. It also insults the nation’s proud Yiddish heritage. Hopefully the Postal Service and the government will now do the right thing and rapidly withdraw it from circulation. It is causing wholly unnecessary pain all around.


September 2017

QUESTION OF THE MONTH: Is there a renewed initiative to talk EU Commission President Juncker into embracing Eastern Europe’s “Double Genocide Industry” mantra about all of Europe needing to accept a “unified  history” = the claim that Prague Declaration Holocaust revisionism is the one acceptable history (as per the criminalization of dissent in some East European countries)?

BACKGROUND: The 2008 Tallinn proclamation and UK MP John Mann’s Response in the House of Commons; On the 2008 Prague Declaration; The 2012 Seventy Years Declaration; Sample attempt to (ab)use the “United Europe United History” slogan; Criminalization of dissenting views in Eastern Europe (Latvia; Lithuania; Ukraine). Fate of an earlier attempt to manipulate the EU into “legislating” history as per eastern states’ demands.


19 September 2017

All welcome at this Sunday’s Vilnius showing of the new film The Last Sunday in August about Malát (Molėtai). 24 September 2017 at 6 PM at the Ozas Multi Cinema, Ozo 18, Vilnius 08009. Admission free but pre-registration required (phone or SMS: +3706 718-6202 or +3706 153-9950). For background see DH’s Malát section. Trailer for the film.

Last Sunday in August

Would Ukraine really want to compromise its international integrity by naming “Stepan Bandera University” in Lviv? More on Stepan Bandera, head of groups that murdered hundreds of thousands of civilian Jews and Poles in the Hitler era. DH recommends G. Rossolinski-Liebe’s indispensable book.

Yet another “Roma Integration Project” goes badly wrong in Vilnius

Opinion piece on next week’s conference on The Shtetl, to be held at the Lithuanian parliament

All welcome at opening of the Nechama Lifschitz  Exhibit at the Tolerance Center (Naugarduko 10/2, Vilnius, +3705 231-2357) at 6 PM on 25 September 2017


8 September 2017

Defending History Brings Results

Lithuanian Gov. Announces Name Change for a Far-Right History-Distorting “Genocide Museum”

“COURAGEOUS STEP”;  DEFENDING HISTORY SAYS: CONGRATULATIONS!

READ MORE


2 September 2017

 Vilnius Celebrates Milan Chersonski’s 80th Birthday on September 2nd 2017

אַ ליכטיקן געבאָרנטאָג, טײַערער מילאַן!

Milan Chersonski

Holocaust flight survivor. Powerful essayist and masterful editor. For 20 years he directed the Vilnius Yiddish Folk Theater. Then, for a dozen years he edited Jerusalem of Lithuania, the Jewish community’s quadrilingual (English-Lithuanian-Russian-Yiddish) newspaper (with each issue produced in four separate editions). Beloved writer at DefendingHistory.com. Champion for Jewish and human rights causes, freedom of speech, and a just and fair society for all. Vilnius says: Happy Birthday, Milan!


1 September 2017

TRENDING AT DEFENDING

Josh Cohen on  the moral aspect of US-Ukraine relations (Reuters)

Pinchos Fridberg on current trajectory of “Double Genocide” (Strajk.eu)

Zev Friedman on New York meeting with mayor of Vilnius [5 Towns Jewish Times]

Dovid Katz on NATO’s new gung-ho film (Algemeiner.com)

Nehro Khalil on US Congressional appeal on Old Vilnius cemetery [Weekly of Vilnius]

Andrius Kulikauskas on a new center named for an ethnic-cleansing advocate

Cnaan Liphshiz on troops that train over graves of Holocaust victims in Kaunas (JTA)

Julius Norwilla on drive to save old Vilnius cemetery  (Bernardinai.lt)

Efraim Zuroff on antisemitism in Eastern Europe (Arutz Sheva)

Latest in DefendingHistory.com


23 August 2017

8 East European Countries Issue New Call for Double Genocide, Demanding “Equal” Status for Nazi and Soviet Crimes

Call comes from the Czech Republic, Croatia, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, & Slovakia

EU Taxpayer Financed “Prague Platform” Plays Key Role in the Ongoing Orchestration. Meanwhile, “Platform” boasts that its new competition for a mix-n-match red-brown memorial is “under the High Patronage of the European Parliament”. It’s “Bible” is the 2008 Prague Declaration (PD). Defending History working with 71 Euro-parliamentarians (including eight very courageous Lithuanian legislators) countered with the 2012 Seventy Years Declaration (SYD); its text in European languages.

Irina-Anatolevna-Izhoginas-cartoon

by Irina Izhogina for DefendingHistory.com

Defending History’s comment: “Instead of simply highlighting the legitimate need to recognize, condemn, study and memorialize Communist crimes, as a distinct issue, the injection of “equality” by eight (only East European!) countries, once again underscores the far-right ultranationalist drive to obfuscate and downgrade the Holocaust by way of “Prague Declaration” style ruses to invoke a bogus equivalence between Nazism and Communism. One of the prime motives is to write the massive local collaboration (and in some countries active participation) in the Holocaust  out of history, while finding cunning ways to glorify local Holocaust collaborators as “heroes”. It is high time for the West, once again, to Just Say No.”

More on Double Genocide: Shimon AlperovichVytenis Povilas AndriukaitisYitzhak AradEvaldas BalciunasYehuda BauerDanny Ben-MosheMilan ChersonskiLeonidas Donskis, Jonathan FreedlandPinchos Fridberg, Clemens HeniDovid KatzRachel KostanianDenis MacShaneJohn MannEfraim Zuroff


August 2017

12 US Congressmen Call on Lithuania’s President to Move Convention Center Project Away from the Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery

LITE-Vulovak-on-national-convention-center-opening

by Vulovak for DefendingHistory.com

After publication by Defending History, rapid response comes from president of Lithuania, foreign minister, advisor to PM, and others. They refer to “permissions” from the markedly controversial London rabbis of the “CPJCE” exposed by WikileaksJerusalem PostJTA, and DH (no mention of the overwhelming international and local opposition or 40,000 petition signatories); also from the “official” Jewish community whose leadership allegedly rigged elections last spring to stay in power; no mention in politicians’ statements of gov. consulting also with the democratically elected 21 members of the Vilnius Jewish Community’s Council. But Vilnius broadcast media went to Vilnius community’s leader too. Professor Sid (Shnayer) Leiman (New York) responds to the president of Lithuania. Petition author Ruta Bloshtein (Vilnius) responds.

International media coverage — JTA (Jewish Telegraphic Agency), Times of Israel (French edition), Hamodia, Five Towns Jewish Times(2), Professor Sid Leiman responds to Lithuania’s president.

Baltic media coverage (in Lithuanian, English, Polish, Russian)  15min.lt,  Baltnews.lt, BNS via Lithuania Tribune (2), Delfi.lt, eajc.org,  Kurier.lt,  LJCLNK (at: 13:40), LRT.lt/mediatekaLzinios.lt, NovayaGazeta.ee,  Obzor.ltTV3.lt, Weekly of Vilnius, Wilnoteka.lt; Ruta Bloshtein’s petition update.

ENGLISH TRANSLATION OF VILNIUS TV & RADIO DISCUSSIONS

International petition passes 40,000 signature mark.  Pleas from around the world continue to mount.

Congress Letter on Piramont


August 2017

NATO Must Stand For Western Values

Our take? Putin’s shameful “Zapad 17” military exercise demo, in  regions bordering the eastern democratic lands of NATO and the EU, intended to intimidate their peaceful populations, needs to be exposed for what it is and countered with stalwart determination.  That makes it all the more critical for NATO (and the EU) not to succumb to regional far-right, ultranationalist, chauvinist, Holocaust-revisionist, and antisemitic forces in the course of the proceedings. Indeed, when NATO has a lapse in upholding Western ideals, principles and causes, especially those for which the Allies fought during World War II and the Holocaust, it is incumbent upon genuine friends of NATO to point it out sharp and clear. This latest episode also impacts the principle that citizens of Eastern NATO countries deserve the same standards of freedom of speech and democracy as all others. It is, moreover, incumbent on US embassies in the Baltics, particularly in Vilnius, to stop defaming (as “Russian lackeys”) those (including US citizens these embassies exist to represent!)  who stand up to far-right Holocaust revisionism and work for human rights in the region.

NATO has issued a new film extolling the Baltic  postwar “Forest Brothers” with no mention of the “problem” that many (or most) were recycled Hitlerist forces, that most of their targets for murder were civilians, and that most harbored Nazi views of racial purity and hatred of their nations’ minorities. The film’s official description misleadingly implies that these “Brothers” were generally or equally comprised of people from “both sides of the war” and includes no mention of the related 21st century issues of glorification of Nazi collaborators in Eastern Europe (or the 1950s glee taken by the “Brothers” in the Holocaust). In Vilnius, a city official was just fired for daring to question whether the “Brothers” were right to murder those who worked in state collective farms. While “Forest Brother” relics are preserved as national shrines (courtesy of EU budgets), the last surviving anti-Nazi base of Jewish partisans who fled the Vilna Ghetto is being left to sink right into the earth.

More on the alarming changes in recent years in US State Department policy: section; page; via Yivo; the neocon movement; and the DC Holocaust Museum (USHMM); DH’s USA page and section. Related: The allegedly most corrupt federal agency in Washington is the taxpayer-funded “US Commission for the Preservation of the American Heritage Abroad” (USCPAHA) which has in recent years colluded with forces entangled in destruction of the Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery. But in  July 2017, twelve US congressmen defiantly wrote a powerful letter to the president of Lithuania.


July 2017

Rights of Deceased People are also Human Rights!

Non-Jewish Lithuanian citizens are starting to take the lead in the campaign to save the Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery from plans to plonk a convention center in its center, where people would revel, cheer, drink at bars and flush toilets surrounded by thousands of Vilna Jews buried there from the 15th to the 19th centuries (a fate that would never befall a Christian cemetery in today’s EU). This poster, produced in July 2017 by Julius Norwilla, includes a quote from philosopher Dr. Andrius Kulikauskas, and the visualization created by a young Vilnius artist.

See more on international opposition; a summary of the saga; views of a major scholar on the cemetery’s history; a recent short film; the international petition that is approaching 40,000 signatures; full translation of the new poster; English version of the poster. The new Yiddish version. DH section on the Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery.

PIRAMONT POSTER Lite

CLICK HERE FOR ENGLISH VERSION OF THE POSTER

 טאַפּט אָנעט אָטאָ דאָ אויפן יידישן נוסח


June 2017

Josh Cohen in Reuters: Will President Trump Confront Ukraine’s Leaders on Naming of Streets for Holocaust Collaborators?

Cohen’s major op-ed is a response to the recent naming of yet another boulevard in Ukraine’s capital, Kiev, for a Holocaust collaborator

UPDATE: WORLD JEWISH CONGRESS FINALLY SPEAKS OUT

“The common denominator here is state-sponsored inversion of history for the purposes of today’s ultra-nationalist, far-right politics: Glorify the Holocaust’s collaborators, defame the victims, survivors and heroes, and you’re heading for the bogus Double Genocide (with its attendant yearned-for obfuscation of the Holocaust)” — Dovid Katz

Ukrainian “OUN” Nationalists Target Citizens who Oppose Glorification of Nazi Collaborators

Moves follow Dolinsky’s “game changing” New York Times op-ed

See Discussion on DH’s Twitter

Also: Ukraine Opens Criminal Investigation into 94 Year Old Jewish World War II Army Hero

Major conceptual expansion of Lithuanian prosecutors’ decade-old campaign against Jewish partisan veterans and Holocaust survivors who speak out

UKRAINE SECTION      DOUBLE GENOCIDE SECTION      MORE FROM DOVID KATZ

State-sponsored and elite-endorsed messaging extols the “heroism” of actual World War II perpetrators and ethnic cleansers as well as increasingly overt “East-European style antisemitism”. But the campaign, masquerading as history, patriotism, political science, mainstream media, and even Holocaust studies, is enabled by the current geopolitical backdrop and a Western tendency to silently “give them all a pass”.

See: Josh Cohen in Foreign Policy (2 May 2016);  Semen Doroshenko in (Ukrainian website) Politnavigator (26 Feb. 2017);  Andreas Umland in New Eastern Europe (7 March 2017);  Sam Sokol in the London Jewish Chronicle (9 March 2017);   Report in JTA (27 March 2017);  Eduard Dolinsky in the New York Times (11 April 2017).

Ukraine elites’ recent statements on matter of race and history: See former MP’s statement; opening of disturbing monument at Babi Yar.

Free speech in Ukraine?  See Josh Cohen in Foreign Policy on laws criminalizing opposing points of view;  DH’s section on similar laws & free-speech infractions throughout Eastern Europe;  DH’s Ukraine section.

Fracas at Paris conference: Group of scholars asks Paris conference to exclude cheerleader for local Ukrainian collaborators;  History News Network;  JTA’s report; Jerusalem Post article by Per Anders Rudling and Efraim Zuroff.

Earlier: See Dovid Katz in Times of Israel, ConsortiumNews.com, Jewish Currents; DH’s media tracker for the 2014-2015 Maidan Revolution period.


June 2017

 Lithuanian National Library Opens New Center Named for Wartime Advocate of Ethnic Cleansing of Nation’s Jewish Minority. Andrius Kulikauskas’s Eyewitness Report.

Does the National Library’s inclusion and celebration of a center named for an “ethnic cleansing advocate” (during the Lithuanian Holocaust) derive “legitimacy” from its neighbor, the Judaic Studies Center opened less then one month ago to universal acclaim, on the same floor, by New York’s Yivo and the National Library’s leadership?

A Question for Yivo’s Board?

Yivo has won back a lot of credibility by now building Jewish studies in Lithuania in cooperation with the National Library and other academic institutions instead of the Red-Brown Commission and Holocaust revisionist agencies as in past years (see Yivo section, scroll to bottom to review chronologically; the 2015 letter from Vilna born Holocaust survivor Prof. Pinchos Fridberg2012 participation in a conference set up to camouflage the concurrent reburial with full honors of the 1941 Nazi puppet prime minister). Has the Holocaust revisionist establishment nevertheless found a way yet again to abuse the Yivo board’s good will and enlist the Yivo brand in attempts to kosherize “by juxtaposition” the glorification of Holocaust collaborators and cheerleaders? Hopefully Yivo’s leaders will this time speak out rapidly with moral clarity and ensure the new center does not remain under the same roof as its neighbor that exists to sanitize the Holocaust’s local supporters. What would Chaikel Lunski, Zelig-Hirsh Kalmanovitsh, Zalmen Reyzen, Tsemakh Shabad, and Max Weinreich have said?


May 2017

Trending in Defending

A Vilnius Visualization Artist Offers Starting Point for Restoration of City’s Old Jewish Cemetery at Piramónt (in Šnipiškės)

Vision for Piramont in Snipiskes

SEE ALSO: NEW AMERICAN SHORT FILM ON FATE OF OLD JEWISH CEMETERY IN VILNIUS, LITHUANIA, WITH PROF. SHNAYER LEIMAN & MALCOLM HOENLEIN

Cemetery as site for new national convention center? Are “compromised” Western organizations also involved? US taxpayer-funded “USCPAHA” and London’s “CPJCE” with their NY “Admas Kodesh”;  International petition;  Opposition to date

Molėtai (Malát), town in northeastern Lithuania: Town church commissioning bas-relief of wartime priest who organized the shooting squad that murdered 100% of the town’s Jews? Paul Alster in The Times of Israel

When East European Governments Make Heroes out of Holocaust Collaborators;  in Ukraine  (+ Twitter);  Vilnius Battle over two Major Collaborators

Bitter new campaign against Holocaust survivor and anti-Nazi resistance hero Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky, who turns 95 on 22 May;  Ronaldas Račinskas, director of state’s “red-brown” commission explains (in documentary film) why he thinks the state must investigate veterans of the anti-Nazi partisans (late head of the Jewish Community noted years ago that it only ever happens to Jewish partisans)

Jewish Life in Vilnius is Not BoringVilna Yiddish Reading Circle Starts new session on Wednesday 17 May 2017, 6 PM. All welcome!

Vilnius University goes for PR bonanza by offering historical “memory diplomas” for students prevented by war from finishing their degrees. But it quickly emerged that the exceptions to the “generous proposal” include Jewish students who survived because they heroically fought the Nazis either as Jewish partisans or in the Soviet army (allied during the Holocaust years with the United States and Great Britain). Details here.  JTA report.


April 2017

17 Organizations in Lithuania Sign Petition in Favor of Central Vilnius Street Name Glorifying Holocaust Promoter K. Škirpa

Among the 17 is Sąjūdis (Vilnius & Kaunas), whose honorary national chairman is Prof. V. Landsbergis, and whose national council includes MP Emanuelis Zingeris. Will Vilnius Mayor Remigijus Šimašius in his reply stand up for what’s right?

Background to the Vilnius street-naming debate.  More street names.  Dr. Andrius Kulikauskas documents Škirpa’s calls for the ethnic cleansing of Lithuania’s Jewish citizens during World War II.

NOREIKA, TOO

RELATED: Incredible and incredibly sad stance on the alleged Holocaust perpetrator J. Noreika: Chief Adviser to the president of Lithuania replies (6 Feb. 2017, to a query from Grant Gochin) on Holocaust collaborator Jonas Noreika “explaining” why it’s okay for him to be a national hero — this, in a country where 96.4% percent of the Jewish minority was murdered. See Evaldas Balčiūnas’s introductory article on Noreika’s Holocaust role; his summary of the summer 2015 petition and debates; protest by the Lithuanian Union of Jewish Students; 2016 call by Jewish Community of Lithuania. Samples of public shrines for Noreika.

29 March London Jewish Chronicle article on glorification of both Skirpa and Noreika in Lithuania; Defending History page and section on regional worship of collaborators and perpetrators.


March 2017

NEW SECTION: A DECADE OF STATE-SPONSORED DEFAMATION AND HARASSMENT OF LITHUANIA’S LAST HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS; SUMMARY TRACKING PAGE HERE

Far Right in Lithuania (with Help from Gov. Agency!) Launches Spring 2017 Campaign Against 95 Year Old Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky, Lithuania’s Oldest Holocaust Survivor, and Hero of the Anti-Nazi Partisans

Defending History’s Call over the Years for a Gracious State Apology to All Five Defamed Holocaust Survivors

BUT STATE-SPONSORED “RED-BROWN” COMMISSION CONTINUES TO DEFAME SURVIVOR IN THE CONTEXT OF PROMOTING DOUBLE GENOCIDE REVISIONISM UNDER COVER OF “HOLOCAUST EDUCATION”

IN THE CONTEXT OF SEVEN PROPOSED SOLUTIONS

Fania Yocheles (later Brantsovsky / Brancovskaja), seated first row left, is the only member of her family to survive the Holocaust. Now, soon to turn 95, she is again the target of an antisemitic campaign that included a latter day “Witch Trial” on Lithuania’s March 11th Independence Day. The state-sponsored Genocide Center has issued an incredible document effectively accusing her late husband of murder for his own role in the Allied partisans in the forests who fought the Nazis and are heroes of the free world.

Campaign Featured at March 11th 2017 Independence Day “Witch Hunt” Protocol Declaimed for Cameras in Forecourt of President’s Palace; The far-right, pro-fascist state-financed “Genocide Center” (page; section) issued a new document on Brantsovsky that declares her not to have been “present” at Kaniūkai, but rather “just” at Jurkonys and Krūminiai, and to have married a “murderer” of Kaniūkai (her late husband), so the “Nationalist Union” rejects all that as far too weak. Is the whole discussion what it is that the “patriots” had to celebrate on their nation’s cherished Independence Day in the forecourt of the presidential palace? The late Leonidas Donskis on the campaign against Jewish partisan veterans: “Intoxicated with hatred against the vanishing Lithuanian Jews.” Is this how national patriots want to say farewell to the last 95 year old scions of the obliterated Litvak civilization after 700 years of coexistence in this land? Our own appeal to newly elected Pres. Grybauskaitė in May 2009.

Effort to Rewrite Holocaust History by Blaming the Victims in the Spirit of “Double Genocide” to Enter 12th Year Next Month; Early International Responses; Comment by Dr. Shimon AlperovichUS Congressmen Berman, Hodes, Wexler; US Congressmen Berkley, Berman, Hodes, Moran, Wexler; Former UK PM Gordon BrownMilan Chersonski; Prof. Leonidas DonskisAbraham Foxman (ADL); Sir Martin GilbertEdward Lucas in the Economist; Dovid Katz; UK MP Denis MacShane


21 March 2017

Vilnius Author of Petition to Save Old Jewish Cemetery and Head of Kaunas Synagogue Deliver Petition (and its 39,000 Signatures) to Lithuanian Government.  On Facebook.

Photo: DefendingHistory.com

The Story    The Ethics    International Opposition    Paper Trail    DH Section


16 March 2017

Hundreds Take Part in Annual March 16th Waffen SS Love-Fest in Heart of Riga, Latvian Capital

EVENTS APPROVED BY RIGA CITY COUNCIL

Protest Outside Latvian Embassy in Berlin; Speeches by Volker Beck and Monica Lowenberg

Reports by JTA, World Jewish Congress, London Express 

Baltic Times and BNS “coverage” mentions only Russian opposition to the marches, ignoring Jewish community, the Holocaust and the de facto celebration of genocidal racism; from the run-up

Monica Lowenberg’s blog documents government, church and elite society’s support for honoring the Waffen SS

PREVIOUS YEARS IN RIGA      IN VILNIUS      IN KAUNAS       DH SECTION;     ALSO: SECTIONS ON LATVIA & ARTICLES BY MONICA LOWENBERGALEKSANDRS FEIGMANIS, ALEKSANDRS KUZMIN


March 2017

 Can Small East European Jewish Communities Maintain their Independence in the Face of Government Interests?

Lithuanian Jewish Community Leadership Elections and Vilnius Jewish Life


11 March 2017

Over 500 Neo-Nazis Granted Center of Vilnius for March 11th Independence Day Parade; Detour to President’s Palace for a Statement Smearing Vilna Ghetto Survivor Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky, 95

IMGP7008

 PREVIOUS YEARS IN VILNIUS      IN KAUNAS      IN RIGA      DH SECTION


16  February 2017

Defending History Monitors Kaunas Neo-Nazi March on Lithuania’s Feb. 16th Independence Day

DSC07797


March-April 2017

38,000 Sign Petition to Save Lithuania’s Oldest Jewish Cemetery from Convention Center Project

Petition, launched by Vilnius’s Ruta Bloshtein, is thought to be largest Litvak endeavor since the Holocaust

February 2017 updates: London CPJCE, unmasked by Wikileaks for asking payments in connection with the old Vilna Jewish cemetery, now announces that the hated Soviet ruin on the cemetery’s premises is for Lithuanians the “Tower of London and the Statue of Liberty” (!); The “shameful” role of a U.S. federal agency that’s supposed to protect Jewish cemeteries abroadLithuanian ambassador in Washington now says his government is “reviewing the situation” (JTA); in The Times of Israel; Report on U.S. rabbis’ meeting with the ambassador (JP Updates); TheYeshivaWorld.comBaltimore Jewish Life; Brooklyn Daily Eagle

The Story   The Ethics   International Opposition   Paper Trail   DH Section

PROF. SHNAYER LEIMAN IN MATZAV; YAIR ROSENBERG IN TABLET;  YANIV POHORYLES IN YNET;  RABBI YONAH BOOKSTEIN IN THE JEWISH JOURNAL AND THE HUFFINGTON POST; IN IZRUS; DR. YVETTE ALT MILLER IN AISH.COM; RABBI PINI DUNNER IN ALGEMEINER.COM; LJC LAY LEADER’S RESPONSE (WEBSITE DOESN’T MENTION PETITION’S EXISTENCE)

RIVA POMERANTZ IN AMI-LIVING; SONIA ZHURAVLYOVA IN THE JEWISH CHRONICLE & DH’S REPLY TO RABBI HERSCHEL GLUCK; IN JEWISH HERITAGE EUROPE; MEP ANTANAS GUOGA IN DELFI.LT / LITHUANIA TRIBUNE; BNS; PRANCIŠKUS VAIŠVILA IN DELFI.LT; TURTO BANKAS; RABBI S.J. FEFFER; 5 FEB DH UPDATE

by VULOVAK for DefendingHistory.com

Lithuania’s senior rabbis, Rabbi Sholom Ber Krinsky and Rabbi Kalev Krelin, were among the early signatories, followed by a statement by Rabbi S. J. Feffer. The previous chief rabbi, Rabbi Chaim Burshtein was publicly dismissed in 2015 for having accepted the unanimous view of top Lithuanian-tradition rabbis worldwide.

Lo Tishkach Jewish Cemeteries Initative gets off the fence and supports Bloshtein’s petition; But silence from the board of “Maceva” and moral (and issue) confusion from “Jewish Heritage Europe” … Latest price tag for the corruption-tinged project is 34 million euros.

WHEN GRAVE TRADERS BOAST THAT THE US STATE DEPT. IS “REPORTING TO SATMAR REBBA” …

The Satmar organization in Monroe, N.Y., affiliated to the London-based CPJCE, boasts that the State Department’s rep from the US taxpayer funded Commission for Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad (USCPAHA) is “reporting to Satmar Rebba” (meaning Rabbi Aaron Teitelbaum; the competing contender for the throne, Rabbi Yekusiel Zalman Teitelbaum, by contrast, personally co-signed a rabbinic ban on defiling the old Vilna Jewish cemetery, joining the world’s Litvak rabbis). The CPJCE allegedly extracts large secretive payments for its permissions and supervisions, as per Wikileaks, reported in the Jerusalem Post, Times of Israel, and Defending History.

CONTINUED PUBLIC SILENCE FROM THE US TAXPAYER FUNDED “COMMISSION FOR THE PRESERVATION OF AMERICA’S HERITAGE ABROAD” (USCPAHA) WHICH HAS ALLEGED CONFLICT-OF-INTEREST TIES WITH LITHUANIAN GOV. ENTITIES AND THE “AARON” BRANCH OF SATMAR HASIDIM IMPLICATED IN THE VILNA CEMETERY SCANDAL. COLOR CODED KEY.

ALSO: See the petition to stop the diversion of government restitution funds deriving from the religious properties of the annihilated Jewish population to the whims of a tiny circle of elites and foreign ministries. Please allocate fairly for the survival and growth of Lithuania’s fragile Jewish community. Background in JTA and Defending History. Latest developments.


1 January 2017
SURPRISE, SURPRISE…

Annual Bandera Birthday March in Center of Kiev, Ukraine’s Capital, Now Includes “JUDEN RAUS”

Will the West maintain its silence on Ukraine’s ongoing glorification of major Holocaust collaborators? What about Western values? Will media coverage again be limited to “Jewish” and “Russian” publications?  Background from 2014. Last July, a Kiev street was officially renamed for Stepan Bandera.

Arutz Sheva    Hamodia    Jerusalem Post   JTA


1 January 2017

Defending History’s 2017 People of the Year

three-winners-1

As 2017 gets underway, Defending History is proud to honor three Vilnius personalities, all from its Orthodox Jewish community this year, who have stood up for cherished principles against powerful forces. In all cases, the principles defended pertain not only to Jewish affairs but to human rights more generally. Their courage and determination can serve as an example to all who defend human rights and history, even when it is inconvenient and draws the ire of power-invested (often state-related) institutions. The three are Rabbi Sholom Ber Krinsky, Ms. Ruta Bloshtein, and Rabbi Kalev Krelin. More here. See from previous years the Prophet Amos Human Rights Awards and the 2014 Person of the Year.

 


28 December 2016

Vilnius Chanukah in 2016

OUR COVERAGE; EARLIER REPORT; LAST YEAR

City of Vilnius    TV3.lt    Lrytas.lt   15min.lt   Delfi.lt   Wilnoteka.lt


3 December 2016

PROF. DOV LEVIN

Kaunas (Kovno) 1925 — Jerusalem 2016

His life. Author of The Litvaks, the Lithuania volume of Yad Vashem’s Encyclopedia of Jewish Communities (Pinkas Hakehillot), and numerous books and studies. In Defending History. Returning his award from the Lithuanian government in solidarity with Yitzhak Arad (2008). Protesting a “one-sided Holocaust conference” in Jerusalem (2009). Photo: speaking at Leivick House Tel Aviv event for Dr. Rachel Margolis (2009). Editor’s comment.

In 2000, Dov Levin’s Trumpa žydų istorija Lietuvoje (A Short History of the Jews of Lithuania) appeared in Vilnius in the translation of Jonas Morkus, published with the assistance of the Israeli Embassy in the Baltics (then in Riga). But today’s Israeli Embassy in Lithuania (in Vilnius) has yet to release a statement on the death of the last great historian of Lithuanian Jewry of the Holocaust survivor generation. Levin was a citizen of Israel from the day of its establishment. He was a veteran of both the Jewish partisans in the forests of Lithuania and the Israeli War of Independence in 1948. After the war, he lived all his life in Jerusalem where he was professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Related: section on Israel related issues.


December 2016

“The Photograph”: A Memoir by Lithuanian Teacher Motiejus Martišius

Simon Malkes Perpetuates the Memory of German Rescuer Karl Plagge

Lev Golinkin in The Nation on Dangers from Ukraine’s Far Right

Dovid Katz in ISGAP on “Antisemitism in the 21st Century Shtetl”


December 2016

End-of-Year Honesty-of-History and Antisemitism Issues Await Public Word from Mayor of Vilnius:

(1) Will he issue a public statement responding to Jewish community chair Faina Kukliansky’s Nov. 11th letter on plaque glorifying Holocaust perpetrator J. Noreika? One year ago, Vilnius Jewish students protested. There is also a Noreika inscription on capital’s central boulevard. Evaldas Balčiūnas’s 2012 article. Balčiūnas section.

(2) Will the mayor support City Councillor Mark Harold’s proposal to rename for inspirationally brave Lithuanian rescuers the Vilnius street currently named for Nazi collaborator Kazys Škirpa? Live report on the 29 Nov. “surreal” debate in the capital’s Old Town Hall. Jewish Community Chair Faina Kukliansky also weighed in with a strong letter concerning the city’s continued honoring of Škirpa with a street name. In September she spoke out about three major collaborators who are still widely glorified by street names and plaques.

(3) Will he speak out on convention center project in heart of city’s old Jewish cemetery (the plan has attracted international opposition)? Recent appeals to him on both shrines for collaborators and planned convention center in heart of old Vilna Jewish cemetery.

Mayor’s colorful record on Jewish issues


ON OUR PAGES 5 YEARS AGO


29 November 2016

In Vilnius, City Council Holds “Surreal” Public Debate on 29 Nov. on Street Name Honoring a Nazi Collaborator; But Will the Mayor (Who Did Not Attend) Ever Speak Out with Moral Clarity?

ŠKIRPA IS IN THE MIDDLE


Reports on Vilnius Jewish Public Library panel & views of Marius Ivaškevičius, Tomas Kajokas, Rūta Vanagaitė, Jurgita Verbickienė, Irena Veisaitė, Efraim Zuroff and others: Library’s Facebook pageLzinios.lt. Comments to Lzinios.lt article refer to Jewish partisans who have still not received an apology for defamation from state agencies, resulting in ongoing abuse for Holocaust Obfuscation in de facto public discourse (as well as permanent historical defamation). Announced panel included no member of Lithuania’s living Jewish community. Also: Vanagaitė exposes a Vilnius-region Holocaust mass grave now for sale. I15min.lt


Dovid Katz on “Antisemitism in the 21st Century Shtetl” (in ISGAP Flashpoint)

and on:  Double Genocide Revisionism in Museums (in Dapim)


Updates on the 2016 “Vilnius Locked-Up Synagogue Saga”; Rabbi Krinsky’s New Blog


BERLIN: CLEMENS HENI ON HOLOCAUST NEGATIONISM AND THE AMERICAN ELECTIONS (in THE TIMES OF ISRAEL)

JERUSALEM: CNAAN LIPHSHIZ ON UKRAINIAN JEWRY’S RESPONSE TO GOV. WORSHIP OF HOLOCAUST COLLABORATOR STEPAN BANDERA (in JTA)

NEW YORK: VANAGAITE AND ZUROFF IN JOINT APPEARANCE IN TEANECK, NJ;  VANAGAITE IS 2016 WINNER OF THE L.A. SIMON WIESENTHAL CENTER’S COVETED “WOMAN OF VALOR” AWARD;  BACKGROUND


READERS IN THE VILNIUS AREA

VILNA YIDDISH LITERARY CIRCLE TO READ FROM CHAIM GRADE (1910-1982)

EVERYONE WELCOME! Next Session Wednesday 30 November 2016, 6 PM at the Jewish Cultural and Information Center, Mėsinių Street 3 in the Old Town. Always with a sharp lens for Lithuanian Yiddish language and culture.

INFORMATION IN YIDDISH           INFORMATION IN LITHUANIAN & ENGLISH

Opinions on History: Now by Diktat of Right-Wing Nationalist Governments at NATO’s Eastern Flank? Where are the Free Speech Monitors at OSCE, NATO, EU, UNESCO, etc?

Parliaments of Poland and Ukraine pass Law stating that World War II a result (solely?) of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact; Reaction of Vladimir Golstein; Coincidental discovery of documents leading to different conclusions published by the right-of-center Telegraph in London. More on recent developments in Poland and Ukraine.

Holocaust Obfuscation (and deflection of blame from the actual perpetrators) not far from the surface? Law follows years of criminalization of dissent to aspects of Double Genocide, maxing out at two years of imprisonment in Lithuania, three in Hungary, five in Latvia, and ten in Ukraine. The explanation for such laws…

THE LATE LEONIDAS DONSKIS (1962—2016) ON CRIMINALIZATION OF DEBATE AND HIS ESSAYS ON RELATED TOPICS 


NEWS AND VIEWS

Andreas Umland in Foreign Policy on Ukraine’s Glorification of Nazi CollaboratorsSam Sokol in JNS.org on Ukrainian Jewish Leader who Dared to Challenge his Government’s Glorification of Collaborators; in ISGAP’s Flashpoint on Butchering History in Ukraine

Did Double Genocide Just Make it to The O’Reilly Factor?

Seth J. Frantzman in the Jerusalem Post on Holocaust Dilution

Dovid Katz in Jewish Currents: “Putin” as Excuse for Hitler-Glorification


Piece by Piece, the Holocaust is Being Downgraded in Europe by East European Manipulation of European Union Institutions

European Shoah Legacy Institute” Legitimizes Double Genocide Politics of  “Prague Platform” by Joining in Organizing Competition for Designs for a Mix-and-Match Red-Brown Monument in Brussels

Prague Platform Continues to Support the 2008 Prague Declaration, the primary document of 21st century East European nationalist driven Holocaust revisionism. See the Europarliamentary response: The Seventy Years Declaration (in 15 languages).

EARLIER REPORT (WHEN COMPETITION WAS ANNOUNCED). Winners and celebration banquet now seem to be flaunted on website of Prague Platform but suppressed on the website of the “Shoah Legacy Institute” . . .

The “Shoah Legacy Institute” is located in Prague. All of the winners of the “Pan European” [!] Competition are from the Czech and Slovak Republics.

SEE DEFENDING HISTORY SECTIONS ON THE PRAGUE DECLARATION, THE PRAGUE “PLATFORM” AND THE DOUBLE GENOCIDE MOVEMENT.

———

Meanwhile, the Prague Platform’s mix-and-match revisionist exhibition on Nazi and Soviet crimes was on display in Canada in Aug. and Sept. 2016, as usual “under the radar” of criticism and scrutiny.


LATEST ON THE NATIONAL CONGRESS CENTER PLANNED FOR HEART OF THE OLD VILNA JEWISH CEMETERY

Vulovak / DefendingHistory.com

(1) Rabbi Tzvi Rotberg, head of major Litvak yeshiva in Israel, issues statement condemning Congress Center plans for the old Jewish cemetery, adding new voice to the international opposition.

(2) Rimvydas Valatka blasts massive corruption in “renovation” of old Soviet Sports Palace; Calls for building National Congress Center elsewhere (without mentioning the Old Jewish Cemetery there or International Opposition). Editor-in-chief of Lrytas.lt, he is a signatory of Lithuania’s 1990 Declaration of Independence.

(3) New wave of publicity on Jewish gravestones found all over Vilnius (following mayor’s “Yiddish sign” campaign), a diversion when accompanied by utter failure to condemn (or even mention) plans for new National Congress Center on top of thousands of Jewish graves where thousands will clap, cheer and urinate over remains of Vilnius citizens buried there for over half a millennium.

(4) Lithuanian Foreign Ministry source tells DH that “our Israeli ambassador” [i.e. in Vilnius]  helped organize Benjamin Netanyahu’s alleged Nov. 2015 blessing for desecration of the cemetery where his own ancestors lie buried. More background to the tale of power, antisemitism (Christian cemeteries don’t get this treatment), greed, photo-op glory, and collusion against the moral force of the thousands of graves honorably purchased over 500 years by Jewish citizens of Vilnius. Israeli embassy invited to clarify its involvement (if any), and above all, to clarify PM Netanyahu’s position. See Israel issues.

GOOD WILL SOLUTION:

Preserve the old Jewish cemetery as a cemetery cum memorial park to which pilfered Jewish gravestones from all over town can be brought to stand in dignity. See essays by Julius Norwilla and Sid Leiman. Move the congress center project to a venue where it will be a pride to all the peoples of Lithuania and Europe.

Last year, a group of the world’s greatest Litvak rabbis came to beg the Vilnius mayor (and other officials) to move the Congress Center project. They still have no answer… The mayor’s colorful record on Jewish affairs.

In late August 2015, world’s leading Litvak rabbis came to beg the mayor of Vilnius to oppose placing the new National Congress Center atop thousands of Vilnius citizens’ graves in the old Vilna Jewish Cemetery at Pitramónt.

See the essays by Ruta BloshteinChaim Burshtein [it got him fired], Milan Chersonski, Pinchos Fridberg, Bernard Fryshman, Dovid Katz, Andrius Kulikauskas, Sid Leiman, Michael Maass and dozens of others.

International Opposition.  Paper Trail.  Defending History Section.

Utter silence from organizations devoted specifically to preservation of Jewish cemeteries, including the donor funded NGO “Maceva” and the United States taxpayer funded “Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad” (USCPAHA) which has been deeply implicated in the machinations of the Satmar rabbis who bless the “Vilnius convention center on the cemetery”… See section on the USCPAHA and the London-based CPJCE. The cave-in by Asra Kadisha. The London CPJCE rabbis who “provide permissions” in effect for  $$$  were exposed by Wikileaks, Jerusalem Post, JTA, and DH.

———

The “Other” Vilnius Question That Won’t Go Away:

Will the mayor (and president and prime minister) speak out on city’s street names and plaques that honor Holocaust collaborators? City streets and plaques glorify Škirpa, Noreika and the LAF’s “June insurrection”

Škirpa is in the middle


DEFENDING HISTORY WAS THERE

Annual Sept. 23 Official Commemoration Ceremony at the Ponár (Paneriai) Mass Murder Site Outside Vilnius, Lithuania

Dramatic Shift: Lithuanian Jewish Community’s Faina Kukliansky Calls for Removal of Street Names and Memorials for Holocaust Collaborators, Boldly Citing Juozas KrikštaponisJonas Noreika, and Kazys Škirpa; Sharp Contrast with Last Year’s Failed Event

Official Jewish community’s lay leader, Faina Kukliansky, standing in front of key government officials, valiantly challenged the sincerity of Holocaust commemoration when there are streets and squares named for major Holocaust collaborators and perpetrators. One participant said: “Her courageous remarks and invoking of specific names made for the moral highlight of the day.”

READ MORE…


The Defending History Community Mourns our Colleague

LEONIDAS DONSKIS

13 August 1962 — 21 September 2016

HIS WORK IN DEFENDING HISTORY INCLUDES ESSAYS ON:

Inflation of the word “genocide” and criminalization of debate

The campaign against Holocaust survivors who joined the anti-Nazi Soviet partisans and its implications

Response to proposals to “reevaluate” the Hitlerist LAF and Provisional Government collaborators of 1941

Reponse to the newest incarnations of Holocaust Denial

Response to the reburial with full honors of 1941 Nazi puppet prime minister; Public letter on effects of the reburial and the participation of Vytautas Magnus University

Reply to domestic critics of European Parliament’s criticism of homophobic legislation

See also his famous essay on Antisemitism in Lithuania

DEFENDING HISTORY COVERAGE OF PROFESSOR DONSKIS INCLUDES

Election to the European Parliament

Aftermath of his dramatic statements about the 2012 Brazaitis reburial; more coverage

♦  Standing up for the European Parliament’s criticism of his country’s policies on LGBT rights

♦ Nida Vasiliauskaitė on Donskis’ reply to Girnius over attempts to rehabilitate the 1941 LAF and the Provisional Government


Malát (Molėtai):  

Julius Norwilla’s take on the recent major event on 29 August 2016 marking the 75th anniversary of the massacre of the town’s 2,000 Jewish inhabitants (not one was rescued).

Speeches at the event by Tsvi-Hirsh Kritzer (the project’s initiator) and Leon Kaplan.

Selection of international media coverage, opinion and debates.


Poland:

Don Snyder in the Forward (NY) exposes the new threat to freedom of speech and research on Holocaust history in Poland. See more on recent developments in Poland; Poland section.

But Western media has largely ignored the deterioration of free speech on Holocaust issues in much of Eastern Europe. See Free Speech section; the long saga of police and prosecutorial harassment of Evaldas Balčiūnas in Lithuania; and the introduction of “Double Genocide” laws criminalizing, in effect, the Western narrative of World War II, with punishments of up to 2 years imprisonment in Lithuania (2010), 3 years in Hungary (2010), 5 years in Latvia (2014), 10 years in Ukraine (2015); but no specific prison sentences mentioned in Estonia’s “Valentine’s Day Law” (2012) …

In some cases, neocon politics preclude even mild critiques of policies of NATO allies in Eastern Europe. In others, there are also budgets for providing honors to presumably useful foreigners from the West who cover for disturbing policies and sometimes become entangled in campaigns in efforts against local scholars, activists, and journalists who dare dissent. For geopolitical reasons, there are occasionally issues concerning the US State Department (more here; US section; page), the British Foreign Office (see also Monica Lowenberg section, DH section); the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs; and others. Israel (and its embassy in Vilnius) continue to fail to ask for state apologies for the three Israeli citizens defamed for posterity.

———

Dozens of Scholars of Polish Jewish History Sign a Bold and Historic Open Letter on Polish Government’s Distortions of History on Jedwabne and Kielce

Suspense rising on ultimate decision of master Brandeis scholar Antony Polonsky, who some think may have been manipulated by Lithuanian state honors in that country’s Holocaust politics. Some of those who signed the bold and forthright document re Poland have themselves sung a different tune on the Baltics after subsidies from Lithuanian gov. agencies

Will there finally be discussion on why so many Western and Israeli scholars don’t speak up on vastly more state-sponsored Holocaust obfuscation, history fixing, and actual glorification of collaborators in the Baltics and Ukraine? Do free speech and frank discussion end at Poland’s eastern borders?
 ◊

Latvia:

A. Feigmanis on high government officials who think adulation of the Waffen SS is good for the country (and Jewish organizations that won’t speak up);  A. Kuzmin asks whether the EU, OSCE and Council of Europe will comment on Latvia’s still-unrepealed “1998 Declaration” on the Waffen SS. See DH’s Latvia section.


Milan Chersonski Turns 79 (2 Sept): Happy Birthday! Milan’s section in DH. Tribute to his dozen years (1999-2011) of editing Jerusalem of Lithuania.

Defending History Turns 7 (6 Sept)

From our first issue.   Five Years Ago.   Three Years Ago.   The Seventy Years Declaration (SYD) of 2012 (& on its own website).

David Hirsch in Engage and Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian (2009); Avi Friedman in Mishpacha, Ricky Ben-David in the Jerusalem Post, Mark Ames in The Nation, and Wendy Robbins on BBC World Service (2010); Cindy Mindell in the Jewish Ledger and Peter Jukes in Motley Moose (2011); Danny Ben-Moshe in his film Rewriting History (2012); Bernard Dichek in Jerusalem Report (2013); Richard Bloom in his film Defending Holocaust History (2014); Daniel Brook in Slate (2015); Larry Yudelson in the Jewish Standard (2016)


Autumn 2016 Discourse over “Historic Soul” of Central Vilnius

Will Vilnius Mayor & Lithuania’s PM & President Issue Morally Clear Statements on Two Sites Visible from Grand Dukes’ Medieval Hill?

THERE ARE FIVE JEWISH FORMS OF THE FABLED CITY’S NAME: ווילנא, ווילנע, ווילנה, וילנה, ווילניוס

(1) Changing the name of a city center street that glorifies a Nazi collaborator who enthusiastically supported the removal of his country’s Jewish citizens?

FOR MORE BACKGROUND ON KAZYS ŠKIRPA (CENTER) SEE DH ARTICLES BY ANDRIUS KULIKAUSKAS, EVALDAS BALČIŪNAS, AND MILAN CHERSONSKI.  PROF. T. SNYDER’S BLOODLANDS:  “Škirpa used this suffering in his radio broadcasts to spur mobs to murder. Some 2,500 Jews […]” … (p. 192)

RECENT PROTESTS INCLUDE: MARK HAROLD (SPLINTER) OF VILNIUS CITY COUNCIL; SERGEY KANOVICH IN THE LITHUANIA TRIBUNE

One of the Škirpa signs is right on the Museum of Applied Arts building. But is this what the museum wants to be known for? Could its directors join efforts to replace the name with one that brings pride and inclusiveness to modern Vilnius?

READ MORE; MORE STREET NAMES & SHRINES FOR COLLABORATORS; WITHIN VILNIUS; THE 2012 REBURIAL WITH FULL HONORS OF 1941 NAZI PUPPET PMCOLLABORATORS GLORIFIED SECTION

———

(2) Will elected officials speak out in favor of moving the new National Congress Center project away from the old Jewish cemetery where thousands of Vilnius citizens were buried from the 15th to the 19th century?

Vulovak for DefendingHistory.com

READ MORE;  INTERNATIONAL OPPOSITION; THE PAPER TRAIL; DH SECTION; LATEST PLANS ON WEBSITE OF “TURTO BANKAS” AND THEIR SUMMER 2016 PDF

Will organizations that exist to protect Jewish cemeteries speak out now, howsoever mildly, as “bulldozer time” comes upon us? The US taxpayer funded USCPAHA? The privately funded Maceva? Asra Kadisha? Lo Tishkach?  HFPJC? The London CPJCE rabbis allegedly caught red-handed on Wikileaks?

FATE OF  THE BALTICS’ LAST UNDERGROUND JEWISH PARTISAN BASE


FROM THE INTERNATIONAL MEDIA:

24 JULY 2016 JTA REPORT BY CNAAN LIPSHIZ ON KAUNAS KILLING SITE USED NOW TO CELEBRATE WEDDINGS;  26 JULY REACTION FROM THE JEWISH COMMUNITY OF LITHUANIA; 26 JULY REPORT IN TRANSITIONS ON LINE; 5 AUG. REPLY FROM KAUNAS MUNICIPALITY; 9 AUG. JTA REACTION.

20 JULY 2016 TABLET REPORT BY JARED MCBRIDE ON THE GLORIFICATION OF HOLOCAUST PERPETRATORS IN UKRAINE


22 July 2016 Defending History Eyewitness Report

VERDICT IN: EVALDAS BALČIŪNAS NOT GUILTY (AFTER 4 YEARS OF HARASSMENT AND A DOZEN 450 KM ROUND TRIPS FROM HOME — BUT COURT ALLOWS FAR RIGHT “PLAINTIFF” 20 DAYS TO APPEAL)

After years of legal harassment, Evaldas Balčiūnas is found “not guilty” of — telling the truth. He has protested his country’s government continuing to use state funds to honor Nazi collaborators and Holocaust perpetrators. Photo: Julius Norwilla for DH.

Vilnius DH team came 0ut to support Evaldas Balčiūnas, on Friday, 22 July 2016 at Vilnius County Court.

———

Related: Glorification of collaborators in Eastern Europe; public shrines in Lithuania; Evaldas Balčiūnas in DH


22 July 2016

Can Summertime Yiddish be a Prop For Dangerous Holocaust Revisionism?

foreign-minister-linkevicius-awarding-lithuanian-diplomatic-star-to-dr-68120474-550x381

Yiddish-teachers-as-heroes-of-LITHUANIA-and-VILNIUS (1)

READ MORE


14 July 2016

Vilnius City Council “Defers” Decision on Renaming City Center Street Named for Hitler Collaborator

i24 report. Background in DH on British-born city council member, Mark Harold Splinter, who proposed the change (his statement in English). Samples from elsewhere in Lithuania. Wider issue in Eastern Europe. Within “Double Genocide” theory.

READ MORE


15 July 2016

Architects Publish Three Visualizations for National Convention Center Planned for Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery, Where Thousands Still Lie Buried

But critics warn that property magnates, politicians, and their foreign Jewish shmendriks will be haunted for generations by a rather different visualization…

LITE Vulovak on national convention center opening

Vulovak / DefendingHistory.com

A few of the luminous Jewish scholars buried on site are enumerated by Professor Sid Leiman; Professor Leiman’s essay on the current convention center project; the mounting international opposition.


 Meanwhile, Prof. Bernard Fryshman, Inspirer of US Congress Law Protecting Minorities’ Cemeteries, Critiques Pliant London Rabbis and US Gov’s “Commission to Protect American Heritage Abroad” on Failure to Oppose Planned Convention Center in the Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery

See Latest Coverage.  Prof. Fryshman’s Article.  Paper Trail.

———

JULY 2016: Vilnius-based Rabbi Samuel Jacob Feffer pleads with Lithuanian political icons Emanuelis Zingeris (left) and Vytautas Landsbergis, both  signatories of the the nation’s declaration of independence, to come out against the deeply hurtful “national convention center in the old Vilna Jewish cemetery” project. PHOTO: JULIUS NORWILLA.

———

Vilnius mayor’s PR machine tries to cover “the Jewish cemetery affair” with photo-ops on removal of the small Soviet-era electric power station made of Jewish gravestones, after his “Yiddish offensive” of “ludicrous” multilingual signs — all in the absence, to this day,  of  a word of polite public reply to the great Litvak rabbis who came to beg him to stand up against the project for a national convention center where thousands will cheer, sing and use toilets over a half millennium of Vilna Jewish graves. Does he really want that to be his defining image for history?  Does he care about what the convention center project is doing to his city’s reputation? “The ghosts who will haunt his honor the mayor are not those from the electro-power station.”

THOSE AROUND THE WORLD WHO HAVE SPOKEN OUT

Will organizations that exist to protect Jewish cemeteries speak out now, howsoever mildly, as “bulldozer time” comes upon us? Maceva? Asra Kadisha? Lo Tishkach? USCPAHA [/inDH]? HFPJC? CPJCE [/in DH]? EU?

RELATED: AND WHICH ORGANIZATIONS ARE SPEAKING OUT FOR PRESERVATION OF THE BALTICS’ LAST UNDERGROUND JEWISH PARTISAN BASE?


VISITORS TO VILNIUS, LITHUANIA:
NEXT YIDDISH READING CIRCLE: MONDAY EVENING 25 JULY 2016 AT 6 PM AT THE JEWISH CULTURAL CENTER, MESINIU STREET 3, OLD TOWN. ALL WELCOME.

11 July 2016

Kaunas Court Affirms Sentence of Two Years “Restricted Freedom” for “Facilitation of Genocide” by Former KGB Officer for Arresting Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas in 1956

SEE OBZOR REPORT THAT CITES BNS; REPORTS CONFIRMED BY LITHUANIAN COURT OF APPEAL AND TIESOS.LT; HOLOCAUST ASPECTS REPORTED BY ISRAELI RUSSIAN LANGUAGE NEWS PORTAL IZRUS

Ramanauskas-Vanagas was an Alleged Nazi Collaborator Implicated in Holocaust Crimes

READ MORE


July 2016

Western Mainstream Media Fails to Mention that East European Allies of the West are Investing in Glorification of Hitler’s Local Collaborators

Huffington Post Piece on Stepan Bandera Worship in Ukraine Omits his Orgnaization’s Responsibility for Hundreds of Thousands of Murders of Poles and Jews; Major New Historical Book on Bandera Still Goes Unmentioned

Even Prodigious Newsweek Story on Vanagaite-Zuroff Book Omits the Issue of State Glorification (Street Names, Plaques, Memorials) for Nazi Collaborators; Article Gives Red-Brown Commission PR Cover; No Mention of Prague Declaration or the State Campaign against Holocaust Survivors who Resisted

The Conceptual War over History at the Core of Current Discourse in “Battle of the Declarations”: 2008 Prague Declaration that put “Double Genocide” on the Map and the 2012 Seventy Years Declaration that Punctured its PR Tank

SEE MORE ON: DOUBLE GENOCIDE, THE SEVENTY YEARS DECLARATIONGLORIFICATION OF COLLABORATORS AND THE PARALLEL CAMPAIGN AGAINST HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS WHO RESISTED


LATE JUNE / EARLY JULY 2016

Defending History Brings Results

Five years ago in 2011, on the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of the Lithuanian Holocaust on 23 June 1941 and the following days — nationalist murderers killed thousands of Jewish neighbors before the first German forces arrived or assumed control — the state sponsored an array of activities honoring the “rebels” (an historic nonsense, the Soviet occupying forces were fleeing Hitler’s invasion, the largest in human history, not the local Jew-killers). That sham was followed a year later by the reburial with full honors of the Nazi puppet prime minister. This year, celebrations have been limited to fringe ultranationalist groups with the government maintaining its distance (there was a regrettable parliamentary document last Nov. proposed by some right-wing MPs, but it was largely ignored). Congratulations to Lithuania’s leaders on this progress toward historic truth during this week’s 75th anniversary of the outbreak of the Lithuanian Holocaust that left 96.4% of its Jewish residents dead. See our proposed seven solutions to the issues remaining.

The Defending History Community’s Unrelenting Campaign Against Glorification of East European Holocaust Collaborators

SUMMER 2016

In-the-News

Vilnius’s “British City Council member” calls for removal of city’s shrines for Nazi collaborators; Philosopher Andrius Kulikauskas writes an open letter to Archbishop on Jewish issues

Will anyone stand up to the London-based CPJCE (“Committee for the Preservation of Jewish Cemeteries in Europe”) that allegedly earns $$$ from the desecration of Vilna’s old Jewish cemetery? See: Opposition to date; Paper trail; DH section; CPJCE section; Attempts to ensnare the young new rabbi in Vilnius? GeoBaltic’s latest survey including 1944 aerial photos.  Latest: Discoveries of major 1935 rabbinic documents from Vilna and from Tel Aviv

Josh Cohen in Foreign Policy on Ukraine’s project to “fix” Holocaust history; Former president of Ukrainian World Congress attacks the author personally, while accusing “the Jews” in the Ukraine famine of 1932-1933; more; New paper on genocidal nationalism; older Ukraine page

5-years-ago-370x229

Respectfully disagreeing with a Yale professor on East European style Holocaust revisionism

Two startling, brave new books by descendants of Holocaust perpetrators:

Linas Vildžiūnas reviews Rūta Vanagaitė’s new book on the Lithuanian Holocaust (written with Efraim Zuroff); Vanagaitė responds to establishment’s far-right barrage; Dramatic Lithuanian debate. Barbara Sofer in the Jerusalem Post; Cnaan Liphshiz in JTA; Paul Alster in Jerusalem Report; More in English

and

J.P. O’Malley in Times of Israel on Rita Gabis’s new book; Reviews in the New Yorker,  Kirkus Reviews; New York Journal of Books; more. Author interviewed on CSPAN and NY Times Closeup series (timecode 25:28)

Efraim Zuroff in the Jerusalem Post on glorification of collaborators in Croatia and beyond; More in OLC

Dovid Katz in Novaya Gazeta (Baltics) on the campaign in Eastern Europe to revise history; in GIA; ToI; J-CURCNAJ; JRBTABGuardian; IT; JCDHMore

Lithuania’s chief neo-Nazi blogger, “Zeppelinus” (said to be a high official in the Economy Ministry) now asks gov. to expel Defending History editor in retaliation for (!) Israel’s expulsion of a Lithuanian citizen; Zeppo has long public record of racism, misogyny, antisemitism and homophobia, and long disapproves of DH’s editor

Dr. Craig Wight’s (University of Plymouth) critique of museums that deal with “genocide” in Lithuania (from a philosopher’s standpoint); Our editor’s (rather less philosophical) summary (timecodes 1:48, 6:23). . .


4 June 2016

Vilnius Mass Grave Features Swastika and “Juden Raus” that are “Discreetly Engraved” at the Top

At the site, Naujaneriai, 1,767 Lithuanian Jewish citizens were murdered by Special Squad, local police & white-armbander “partisans” on 24 Sept. 1941

Discovery by Julius Norwilla indicates it’s from before cement was dry…

swastika on mass grave


29 May 2016

“Double Genociders” Export Far Right’s Holocaust Revisionism Westward

Prague Platform” along with Slovak government boast cover of the “European Shoah Legacy Institute” (!) in announcing:

EU Competition (for Students Aged 16-21) for a New Red-Brown, Mix-n-Match Jumble Memorial in Brussels

See: Dovid Katz in Global International Analytics (GIA)

Will the red-equals-brown street-shows of Eastern Europe now be exported to Brussels under cover of a “Jewish” organization dedicated to Holocaust justice?

“Guidelines” include the requirement that “the memorial must be inclusive of the victims of National Socialism, Fascism and Communism”

“BATTLE OF THE DECLARATIONS”: PRAGUE DECLARATION (2008) vs. SEVENTY YEARS DECLARATION (2012) [in 15 European languages]

LONG RECORD OF USE OF JEWISH, YIDDISH, OR HOLOCAUST PROJECTS AS A KIND OF PR COVER FOR HOLOCAUST REVISIONISM
Irina Anatolevna Izhogina's cartoon

by Irina Izhogina

ALSO: EU funded “Prague Platform” exhibit that spews Double Genocide revisionism of the Holocaust arrives in Budapest; More on the “Platform” and the exhibit that circles the globe (courtesy of EU taxpayers) to underpin Eastern European far-right revisionism; Still, Platform’s director insists that nobody is erecting monuments for Nazi collaborators — Unaware of news from Croatia, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine?   More

Background: The “Prague Declaration” and the Double Genocide movement



3 May 2016

Colleagues in Paris and Vilnius

Event in Paris on the Lithuanian Holocaust on Tuesday 3 May at 5 PM at 9 rue Mahler (Room 107). Organized by Yahad-in-Unum with unspecified Lithuanian partners and including a video link with a team in Lithuania…

QUESTIONS: The questions that people are asking in the absence of a detailed public program on thbe organization’s website: Is Yahad-in-Unum co-organizing the event with any of the many bold Lithuanian intellectuals who have given so very much to the cause of simple Holocaust truth-telling, or will it be abused for revisionist PR in the hands of the “Red-Brown Commission” and  the “Genocide Center”? Have the organizers invited (for example) Chaim BargmanSaulius Beržinis, Dr. Valentinas Brandišauskas, Milan ChersonskiProfessor Pinchos FridbergRachel Kostanian, Andrius Kulikauskas, Professor L. Truska, Rūta Vanagaitė?

SEE NEW SECTION ON FRANCE


22 April 2016

Réyze Levit (Roza Levitaitė)

1939—2016

Proud member of Lithuania’s Jewish community who boldly stood up to tell the truth about history revisionism and the rise of ever more Jewless “PR Jewish institutions”… Her 2014 interview with us.


15 April 2016

Kaunas native (Holocaust Survivor in NY) records eyewitness account of unspeakable barbarism of 17, 18, & 19 year old “LAF white-armbander freedom fighters” in late June 1941. But state-sponsored museumsstreet names and events continue to glorify the Holocaust perpetrators in an elaborate double game (that is often underpinned/camouflaged by the exploitation of gullible Westerners).

More videographed eyewitness testimony, and works of historians. But executive director of a state-sponsored “red-brown commission” tries to deny local fascists’ murder rampage in June 1941, while supporting prosecution of Jewish partisan heroes who escaped the Vilna Ghetto…


30 March 2016 

Aftermath of the Baltic Neo-Nazi Marching Season:

EFRAIM ZUROFF IN THE JERUSALEM POST CALLS ON LATVIA TO CONFRONT ITS PAST

MONICA LOWENBERG IN HOPE NOT HATE CALLS ON BRITAIN’S FOREIGN MINISTRY TO STOP COVERING FOR EAST EUROPEAN GLORIFICATION OF NAZISM; RESPONSE OF UK’S MINISTER FOR EUROPE, AND OF THE LATVIAN AMBASSADOR IN LONDON

DOVID KATZ IN GLOBAL INDEPENDENT ANALYTICS ANALYZES THE WEST’S WALL OF SILENCE [translated into French]; FOLLOW-UP AT ISGAP


11 March 2016

Defending History Monitors 9th Annual Neo-Nazi March in Central Vilnius on Nation’s 11th March Independence Day 

Fascist and White Power Symbols, Placards Glorifying Holocaust Collaborators, and Antisemitic Caricatures are Flaunted on Route from Central Cathedral to House of Parliament

STILL NO COMMENT FROM  MAYOR’S OFFICE?  FROM ISRAELI EMBASSY?   MEANWHILE ISRAELI AMBASSADOR IN PHOTO-OP GUSH FEST WITH KAUNAS OFFICIALS, BUT NO PUBLIC COMMENT ON THE EARLIER 16 FEBRUARY 2016 EVENT IN KAUNAS THAT GLORIFIED FIVE HOLOCAUST COLLABORATORS IN THE CITY CENTER. KOVNO SURVIVOR QUOTED FROM GENESIS 4: 10 —

 קוֹל דְּמֵי אָחִיךָ צֹעֲקִים אֵלַי מִן הָאֲדָמָה

 ———

IMAGES FROM VILNIUS ON MARCH 11th:

PHOTO: EVALDAS BALCIUNAS FOR DH

antisemitic caricature - Copy

PHOTO: VILMA FIOKLA KIURE FOR DH

Eyewitness Reports by

Vilma Fiokla Kiurė  and  Evaldas Balčiūnas

Defending History Monitors the Marches:

Kaunas, VilniusRiga


March 2016 

Pro-Nazi Marches in Kaunas, VilniusRiga:

Will Western and Israeli Embassies & International Orgs Condemn Ongoing Granting of the Centers of Capital Cities for Admirers of Hitler’s “Accomplishment” in the Region?

RIGA:

100px-Coat_of_Arms_of_Riga.svg

RUN UP TO MARCH 16 WAFFEN SS CITY CENTER FEST IN RIGA:

UK MP GARETH THOMAS WRITES TO LATVIAN AMBASSADOR AND TO BRITISH FOREIGN OFFICE

MONICA LOWENBERG:  BLOGSPOTINTERNATIONAL PETITION  & IN DH; SAM SOKOL IN THE JERUSALEM POST

MEANWHILE, RULING PARTY LATVIAN MP TELLS MEDIA THAT “CLEVER JEWS” ARE “UNDERMINING HIS NATION’S SECURITY”

PARLIAMENTARIANS WERE SLATED FOR THIS YEAR’S WAFFEN SS FEST ON MARCH 16TH IN THE LATVIAN CAPITAL; BUT LAST MINUTE CLIMBDOWN BY NATIONAL ALLIANCE REVERSES DECISION

DEFENDING HISTORY’S COVERAGE OF THE EVENT FROM 2010

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VILNIUS:

100px-Grand_Coat_of_arms_of_Vilnius.svg

NEO-NAZI MARCH ON INDEPENDENCE DAY, MARCH 11TH, FROM CATHEDRAL SQUARE UP CITY’S MAIN BOULEVARD TO THE HOUSE OF PARLIAMENT

DEFENDING HISTORY’S COVERAGE OF THE EVENT FROM 2008;  JEWISH COMMUNITY CHAIRPERSON SPOKE OUT

Will the popular new young and dashing mayor speak out? Will he ever find them another day and place (not the city center on independence day!) and defend the international dignity of Vilnius? Defending History has followed his colorful record on Jewish issues.

WILL THE CITY OF GEDIMINAS BE DEFILED EACH YEAR AS ITS 700TH YEAR APPROACHES?

DOVID KATZ IN GLOBAL INDEPENDENT ANALYTICS (GIA)

RESPONSE OF NATION’S TOP NEO-NAZI BLOGGER “ZEPPELINUS” (WHO IS ALLEGED TO BE A HIGH OFFICIAL AT THE MINISTRY OF THE ECONOMY) PHOTO MONTAGE OF HIS “WORKS”


3 March 2016

Vilnius Prosecutors Who Have Publicly Named “Investigated Holocaust Survivors” for a Decade, Now Fail to Release The List of Alleged Local Holocaust Perpetrators

TOPSY-TURVY WORLD?

28 February 2016

Sam Sokol in the Jerusalem Post on Plan to Name Yet Another Lithuanian Street for a Holocaust Perpetrator

Report in Delfi.lt  (LZB English version).  Statement of Jewish Community chairperson.

Travesty planned for the town Malát (Molėtai), in eastern Lithuania.  Jewish descendants from abroad planning a major memorial event in August 2016.  A checkered recent history of on-site ceremonies: Occasionally, town authorities seek foreign Jewish investment/PR while continuing to glorify collaborators (and actual murderers) and failing to plaque even mention of the actual local Jewish history (and genocide) in town centers (while “letting the foreign Jews do what they like out in the forest at the mass grave sites”).

Street Names & Plaques  Honoring Holocaust Collaborators Around the Country 

More “Dark Tourism” Sites

The Underlying Issue: Glorification of Collaborators;  International Petition Underway at Change.org

Does the Central Government Lead by Example?  The State’s 2012 Reburial of Hitler’s 1941 Puppet Prime Minister in Kaunas


17 February 2016

EXCLUSIVE:  Sound Track of the Efraim Zuroff — Rūta Vanagaitė Book Presentation in Vilnius (Dr. Zuroff’s comments are in English)

VAST MEDIA COVERAGE OF THE NEW BOOK

Zuroff-Vanagaite book presentation Feb 16

PHOTO OF 17 FEB. 2016 BOOK PRESENTATION IN VILNIUS:  JULIUS NORWILLA
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Convention Center Project on Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery in Disarray; The Opposition to Date; The Paper Trail

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Račinskas’s Red-Brown Commission Announces Triumphant Revival on March 17-19 (his concept of “Holocaust Studies”). Observers ask: Will the Israeli Embassy in Vilnius again provide cover and betray Israeli citizens (Yitzhak AradRachel Margolis (1921-2015) and Joseph Melamed)? Appeal to the conscience of commission members. A dilemma that faces the Israeli Foreign Ministry in March 2016. See: Israel page and section.

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READERS IN CALIFORNIA: We are lecturing at UCLA 17-20 April 2016. To book lectures, seminars, meetings in the days just before or after, please contact us at: info<at>defendinghistory.com. LIST OF TOPICS.


16 February 2016 

Kaunas Authorities Again Granted City Center on February 16th Independence Day to Far-Right Nationalist March

WILL VILNIUS MAYOR DO THE SAME FOR MARCH 11TH?

The Last Eight Neo-Nazi Marches in Vilnius (2008-2015)

The Mayor’s Colorful Record on Jewish Matters

Kaunas Event Glorified Six Nazi Collaborators

Eyewitness Report and Exclusive Photos of Neo-Nazi March in Central Kaunas

Reports by Tablet, JTA, Jerusalem Post. Defending History’s 9 years of monitoring Vilnius and Kaunas marches. Chronicle of Kaunas marches.

This year’s theme was a front-of-march We Know Our Nation’s Heroes banner featuring six figures who share the following unsettling common denominator: all were alleged Nazi collaborators and/or Holocaust perpetrators (from left): Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas, Jonas NoreikaPovilas Plechavičius, Kazys ŠkirpaAntanas Baltūsis-Žvejas, and Juozas Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis. It is as if the marchers are celebrating the murder of the 30,000 Jewish citizens of Kaunas, the more than 95% of the over 200,000 strong Lithuanian Jewish population on the eve of the Holocaust, and the resulting “cleansing” of Lithuania’s Jewish minority.

“We, (Jews) will turn Europe into mixture of Asian people — Negroes, ruled by Jews…” — R. Coudenhove-Kalergi, “Father” of European Union. NO TO THE ISLAMIZATION OF LITHUANIA!

MORE

Poland’s right-wing government is latest in Eastern Europe to criminalize speech on the Holocaust, following laws in Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia & Ukraine; Poland’s Far Right attempts to strip Prof. Jan Gross of a state honor for telling the truth about the Holocaust…

New massive digging at Vilnius’s Old Jewish Cemetery at Piramónt?


26 January 2016

MAJOR NEW BOOK ON THE LITHUANIAN HOLOCAUST AND ITS CURRENT LEGACIES LAUNCHED IN VILNIUS

For the first time, a Lithuanian author teams up with an Israeli Holocaust scholar in search for the truth about widespread local enthusiasm, seventy-five years ago, for mass murder of civilian neighbors, and today’s failures in coming to grips with that history, in a land of hundreds of Jedwabnes. A genuine historic advance in Lithuanian-Jewish relations is seen in the startling partnership of Rūta Vanagaitė and Dr. Efraim Zuroff in Vanagaitė’s Mūsiškiai: Kelionė su priešu (“Our People: Journey with an Enemy”). A selection of the vast media coverage is available here. The book was launched in Vilnius on 26 January 2016.


NEW SECTIONS:

JAPAN        FRANCE


14 January 2016 

Why is the West Afraid to Criticize Nazi-Worship in Ukraine?

James Carden in The Nation on New US Aid for Ukraine’s Neo-Nazi “Azov Battalion”

Sam Sokol in The Jerusalem Post

BUT DOES THE WEST CARE ABOUT “MAINSTREAM” UKRAINIAN GOVERNMENT WORSHIP OF STEPAN BANDERA AND OTHER HOLOCAUST COLLABORATORS?

UKRAINE SECTION ♦ HOLOCAUST ASPECTS OF THE 2014-2015 MAIDAN PERIOD  ♦ COLLABORATORS GLORIFIED SECTION

Cover-Up Attempts Crumbled Back in 2015: Adulation of Holocaust Perpetrators was Confirmed as Poroshenko and Parliament Enacted Laws “Codifying” Fascist-Leaning History and Criminalizing Other Points of View

Foreign Policy   Haaretz   HNN   Jerusalem Post   The Nation   OSCE   New Republic   Times of Israel   USHMM.  BACKGROUND: Dovid Katz in The Times of Israel (+ follow-up).

US Holocaust Museum called on Ukraine to abandon law that would criminalize historic research and make the glorification of Holocaust criminals a national “truth”; OSCE (finally…)

Dozens of Western / Anti-Putin scholars sign letter calling on Ukraine to abandon the law

Article in Foreign Policy called on Ukraine not to shoot itself in foot

♦ The Legacy from 2014: US Representative John Conyers’ original amendment of May 2014 back in Focus; Tom Parfitt’s August 2014 report in London’s Telegraph

Does “mainstream, pro-Western” President Poroshenko, who publicly fools around with Bandera insignia, make light of the hundreds of thousands of Jews, Poles, and other civilians butchered by Banderist fascist forces in Ukraine?

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♦ In October 2014, Ukraine parliament and president proclaimed a national holiday to celebrate Bandera’s genocidal movement; Report in International Business Times; In tweet, Ukraine’s president said UPA fighters were an “example of heroism”…

♦ Are Ukraine’s ultranationalist supporters stifling free debate in North America? Targeting of the work of Professor Stephen Cohen. The Toronto Symphony Orchestra saga.

♦ The major new monumental book on the genocidal Bandera movement cannot be suppressed much longer . . .


4 January 2016 

Andrius Kulikauskas Speaks Out in Major Lithuanian Publication on Fate of Vilnius’s Piramónt Cemetery in Šnipiškės

AUTHOR’S SUMMARY IN ENGLISH;  IN RUSSIAN TRANSLATION

skeltas-3 black background lite

VULOVAK / DEFENDING HISTORY

PROFESSOR SIDNEY LEIMAN (NY); PLUS DATA FOR RECONSTRUCTION

MILAN CHERSONSKI AND DOVID KATZ

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OPPOSITION   PAPER TRAIL   HIGH INTRIGUE    DH SECTION    EU

 ◊

OLDER FRONT PAGE POSTS

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A “Day of Shame” in Annals of Lithuanian Jewish History?



Did a “Dubious Minyan of Ten State Property Bank Officials” with Alleged “Jewish Enablers” Just Sell Out the Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery for a Multimillion Euro Conference Center?

Are leaders of  some American Jewish organizations betraying Jewish interests for a pot of lentils from East European governments? AJC’s Andy Baker trashes Ruta Bloshtein’s petition and its tens of thousands of signatories; another one-sided YIVO “symposium” (but with powerful audience questions from Ms. Rebecca Cook and Prof. Bernard Fryshman)… Top state medals for Yivo and AJC leaders (see Yivo’s “politics in Lithuania” record from 2011). “History will be very clear about all this, notwithstanding the current mush achieved by some big PR bucks.” Recent PR shtik includes claiming some books found decades ago are “just now discovered” and recruiting an American JTS academic (who helped cover for two new buildings on the old Vilna cemetery over a decade ago) to tell the media they are “the new Dead Sea Scrolls”…

If a new national convention center is indeed to open at the old Vilna Jewish cemetery, thousands each night would cheer, sing, clap, dance, use bars and flush toilets surrounded by thousands of Vilna Jewish graves going back over 500 years. Including the parents and son of the Gaon of Vilna. Just as the state-sponsored “2020 Year of the Gaon” gets underway, including a handsome new recombinated menorah coin.

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Posted in American Jewish Committee (AJC) in Lithuania, Cemeteries and Mass Graves, Christian-Jewish Issues, CPJCE (London), Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery at Piramónt (in Šnipiškės / Shnípishok), Politics of Memory, Yivo Manipulated? | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on A “Day of Shame” in Annals of Lithuanian Jewish History?

On the (Ab)use of Law to “Fix” Holocaust History



OPINION  |  DOUBLE GENOCIDE  |  FREE SPEECH  |  STATES’ MANIPULATION OF HISTORY

by Dovid Katz

This comment appeared in Mémoires en Jeu (Memory at Stake), no. 9, (2010).

In recent years, a number of eastern EU and NATO member states (plus Ukraine) have been constructing components of their official(and protected-by-law) national narratives on heroes who were collaborators, or even perpetrators in the Holocaust on the grounds that they were “anti-Soviet heroes.”1 These countries indeed had to face two Soviet occupations (1939/1940–41 and 1944/45–1991), and the occupation by Nazi Germany (1941-1944/5). The “liberating” state was also the author of major crimes such as repressions, deportations, forced labor and executions, and the statutes of post-Soviet Europe lacked a text on the crimes of communism. The ensuing moral problem is as follows: while these States would have legitimate heroes who struggled for freedom against dictatorial Soviet domination, they also honor those who participated in the Holocaust and even criminalize criticism against them.

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Posted in Collaborators Glorified, Double Genocide, Dovid Katz, Estonia, EU, Foreign Ministries: Holocaust Politics Abuse?, Free Speech & Democracy, History, Latvia, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Politics of Memory, Prague "Platform", State Glorification of Holocaust Collaborator J. Noreika | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on On the (Ab)use of Law to “Fix” Holocaust History