I A Second Opinion
The first aim (in terms of ‘the call of the hour’) is to provide a Second Opinion to counter the ongoing efforts to minimize, relativise and confuse the Holocaust. Collectively these efforts constitute the Holocaust Obfuscation movement. It seeks to write the Holocaust out of history as distinct concept (without necessarily denying a single death), and replace it with the ‘Double Genocide’ model (known in Eurospeak as ‘equal evaluation of totalitarian regimes’).
The ‘Double Genocide’ campaign has included: attempts to utterly redefine genocide; painfully absurd accusations against aged Holocaust survivors; tacit encouragement of racist and antisemitic moods, particularly victimising today’s remnant Jewish community in this part of the world; attempts to restrict freedom of debate; state financed campaigns to persuade the European Union to accept the revisionist model, via the Prague Declaration, via a Europe-wide mixed Nazi-Soviet commemoration day, and other mechanisms.
Under no circumstances should citizens of the Baltic nations be held responsible for these campaigns being waged by governmental, media, academic and other elite circles.
For orientation on the issues arising please see Media coverage and the background readings on both current issues and the relevant history.
II The Holocaust History at Each Locality
A longer-term project is to provide information on the Holocaust at individual locations in the Baltics, rapidly accessed by clicking on a place name (in both alphabetic list form and on a map). These will include detailed memoirs by survivors, many of which have yet to be translated.
First, such place name based facilities enable (a) today’s local residents and (b) people anywhere who cherish their ancestral heritage, and (c) students internationally to quickly access information on the basis of location. Second, it has in the present climate become necessary to give lucid expression to the universality of liquidation of the entire target population that constitutes genocide.
A first sample format is included on the ‘Locations’ lists on the site’s Lithuanian, Latvian, and Estonian Holocaust pages.
III Litvak Studies and the Yiddish Heritage
The study of the genocide of the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe, and the robust defense of historic truth — and of the waning Survivor community — against the current calumnies, should not deflect from the ongoing need for much more intensive, serious and widespread study of the living language, literature and culture that is left for us and ever-new generations to study, teach and nurture into the future. This is most conspicuously applicable to the Yiddish heritage, which was most severely impacted by the Holocaust, and is today in urgent need of dedicated and wholehearted study, preservation and dissemination internationally. Serious study of this heritage entails study of the Yiddish language aimed at high levels of mastery.
Moreover, the destruction of the Litvak heritage was arguably the most complete in the Holocaust, because: (a) the areas where local Baltic forces carried out much of the genocide had the highest murder rates in Europe; (b) Litvak communities reestablished abroad after the war have been of much lower viability than those carrying forward the southern traditions of East European Jewish culture.
The positive-thinking task before us is therefore clear: the establishment of a viable, robust and intellectually free field of Litvak Studies that will cover with a sense of mission and aspiration to high academic standards the religious, secular, historical, literary, cultural and folkloristic components of Lithuanian Jewry. To this end, the Litvak Studies Institute (LSI) was established in May 2010.