Vilnius Academic Accuses State History Commission of Having Too Many Foreign Jews as Members




VILNIUSA prominent Vilnius academic known for Holocaust “fixing”, “proud” antisemitism, and a desire to make a national holiday of the day the anti-Jewish violence broke out in Lithuania in 1941, Dr. A. Liekis, returned this week to the fray with a mainstream media attack on the presence of “foreign Jewish” scholars in the state’s history commission, known formally as “The International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupational Regimes in Lithuania, and less formally, and for brevity, as the “Red-Brown Commission.”

His son Professor S. Liekis, a prominent member of  the very same commission, helped “cleanse” the Vilnius Yiddish Institute before shutting it down this year, and making its library totally unavailable to local and international scholars and students alike. During the roughly seventeen years of the institute’s existence, hundreds of Litvaks and Holocaust survivors from around the world donated  rare Yiddish books and magazines, especially those bearing on the Litvak legacy, to the institute. It is anticipated that the younger Dr. Liekis will issue a clear statement on the fate of the books known to include treasures of “Nusach Vilna” donated from the collection of the late Jewish partisan veteran and Bundist leader Simon Palevsky.

According to reports from the official Jewish Community of Lithuania, he turned down the offer of a grant that would have kept alive the internationally acclaimed one-month intensive summer course in Yiddish language, literature and culture, founded at Oxford in 1982 and transferred to Vilnius in 1998. Dr. Liekis removed all traces of the website, even as a historic site (replacing it with a disrespectful “definition of Yiddish”). Nevertheless, significant parts of the institute’s history can be gleaned from preserved earlier versions of its website.

So much for the nationalist (and Holocaust revisionist) establishment’s “newfound love of Yiddish” in Eastern Europe.

See  Valentinas Brandišauskas’s classic critique of  A. Liekis’s “history of World War II”.

This entry was posted in "Red-Brown Commission", Antisemitism & Bias, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Media Watch, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, Views of Prof. Sarunas Liekis, Vilnius Yiddish Institute and tagged , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.
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