OPINION | LITHUANIA’S JEWISH COMMUNITY ISSUES | GERMANY

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by Arkady Kurliandchik (Vilnius)

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I am aware that it has long been a practice to award assorted leaders with assorted honors on assorted occasions. Perhaps there is some logic behind it. If you are the leader of something, well, then surely you must deserve recognition!

However, the recent award which was bestowed on the D-Day anniversary upon the head of the “Lithuanian Jewish Community” by the German Embassy here in Vilnius seems rather misplaced. As stated on the LJC website, the award was presented to Ms. Faina Kukliansky “for her tireless work commemorating Lithuanian Holocaust victims and long-term efforts to unite the LJC including enhancing the organization’s role on the national and international level.”

I won’t dispute the efforts to preserve the memory of Holocaust victims. While I am not particularly aware of any special efforts by Faina Kukliansky, I have personally witnessed her precise and sharp speeches at various commemorations. Perhaps there are other significant efforts that I am not privy to, but known to the German ambassador.

However, what is blatantly untrue is the claim of the “long-term efforts to unite the Jewish Community of Lithuania.” The situation is quite the opposite: no one has done more to dismantle what was once a friendly and united community.

First, almost all Jews were expelled from the LJC administration, replaced by those (often with zero Jewish background or life interests) completely indifferent to the needs of the community they are intended to serve, almost oblivious as to whether they have any form of commitment to Jewish life. It has all turned into a sort of private company under the tight control of a single individual.

Then, through sheer deception, the democratic essence of the community association was erased. (It was eradicated so thoroughly that it is now practically impossible to ever elect another chairperson.) At that point, regional Jewish communities declared a vote of No Confidence in the chairperson, but she was then, and remains to this day, uninterested in the opinions of others, including the community she purportedly represents and serves.

When the democratically run Vilnius Jewish Community, representing nearly all the living Jews of Vilnius, tried to restore the previously existing democratic principles, the LJC chairperson resolved the issue very simply. Using the “unlimited funding” available, she set up her own separate and compliant Vilnius community “association” (under a different name) which receives excellent funding despite its representing almost nobody. The actual Vilnius Jewish Community, the largest in Lithuania, has not received one single penny of funding for around ten years now.

Frankly speaking, I have seen even quite decent people swayed by money. Everyone finds their own justification: some claim to have family members to support, while others find it convenient to receive money that that on the face of it seems not to reek. Alas, it is not so. It reeks of the blood that has soaked 230 mass graves across Lithuania, and the symbolic monies known as “restitution.”

The official, state-sponsored “Lithuanian Jewish Community” (actually sponsored by restitution funds deriving from the assets of the annihilated prewar Jewish community) should be an umbrella for local communities. Not a Big Brother or Sister that decides every day whom to punish, whom to reward. Those who obey get treats. Those who do not get the whip.

Despite the Goodwill Foundation board’s recent decision (in response to international pressure) to finally allocate something, no matter how small, to the Vilnius Jewish Community, whose members constitute the largest group of living Jewish people in Lithuania, this decision was not implemented because “some international board” cannot dictate to to the ruling individual who alone determines who gets anything, who gets what, who gets it all.

As for “enhancing the organization’s role on the national and international level”:

Nationally, the head of the “Lithuanian Jewish Community” does expend considerable effort to turn Lithuanians against Jews, saying things that only alienate citizens from each other (e.g. “Jews hate Lithuanians more than Lithuanians hate Jews”).

I cannot comprehend how the chairperson of the “Lithuanian Jewish Community” enhances its role internationally when it is beneath the dignity of such an “important person” to recognize and be accountable to the “commoners” — the living Jewish citizens of Lithuania.

Or, to put it in a nutshell: How can someone who has spent all these years dismantling the actual community be awarded by a foreign embassy (that has never once bothered to contact the actual community) for “unifying” or “enhancing” it?

Perhaps the traditional of awarding honors to longtime holders of leadership offices requires rather more thorough consideration.

Note: All signed articles represent the author’s own views. See our list of authors to date.

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EDITOR’S NOTE (14 JULY 2024):

Numerous Vilnius readers have contacted us to congratulate the author on his courage, brevity, and moral clarity.

A number of foreign readers without intimate knowledge of the issues within Lithuania have contacted us to ask about this or that issue. We regret that we are unable to respond individually. Instead, we offer the following links for Defending History coverage going back, in some cases, a decade and a half. This list is organized by topic names, rather than the precise title of DH sections, articles, or pages. For contrary views from the state- (restitution-) sponsored “Lithuanian Jewish Community” readers are advised to make contact via the official LJC website.

STOLEN ELECTION SAGA. JTA’s coverage. The disenfranchisement of voters mid-campaign. Simon Gurevich’s comments.

AMERICAN JEWISH COMMITTEE (AJC). The inexplicable enabling role of the AJC’s director of foreign affairs, whose medals from the Lithuanian government just grew with his newest medal. See also the 2020 public letter from Vilnius Jewish Community members, and Andrew Baker’s charming reply). With the LJC chairman, he is permanent non-rotating co-chair of the GWF which controls the disbursement of tens of millions of euros in restitution payments. Never once in the decades of banquets and honors has AJC’s man for Lithuania sought out some everyday Jewish residents to hear their views.

CHAIRPERSON’S (STILL UNRETRACTED) “JEWS HATE LITHUANIANS MORE THAN…”. The context and interview in which the notorious “Jews hate Lithuanians even more…”  transpired.

CHAIRPERSON’S VIEW OF LITHUANIA’S JEWS. Original post (deleted after international uproar) and its context.

VILNIUS RABBI SHOLOM BER KRINSKY’S CRITIQUES OF THE LJC/AJC/JWF nexus controlling all funding.

THE “GOOD WILL FOUNDATION” / GWF.  (Geros valios fondas / GVF). The international Boards of the GWF (and queries arising over the profound moral responsibility for in effect helping destroy Lithuanian Jewish communal life). Organizations represented include: American Jewish Committee; American Zionist Movement; Bnai Brith International; Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany; National Coalition Supporting Eurasian Jewry; World Jewish Restitution Organization. Board members enjoy banquets, photo-ops, the finest hotels and service during their visits to Vilnius. Virtually none has ever made an effort to contact everyday local Jewish citizens. None has ever issued a public statement to protest the actual Vilnius Jewish Community, representing most of the capital’s two thousand Jews, receiving absolute zero during all of the Good Will Foundation’s years of existence.

GERMAN FOREIGN MINISTRY & EMBASSY.

THE LJC’S COVERAGE OF THE GERMAN EMBASSY’S RECENT AWARD. But the LJC did not even mention the internationally applauded 2021 honoring by the German Foreign Ministry of Rachel Kostanian for her lifetime of service building the Green House Holocaust museum and gallantly defending Holocaust history from far-right nationalist revisionism over the decades.