Author Archives: Defending History
The Defending History Community’s Statement on Putin’s Barbaric War on Ukraine (and the Free World)
Posted in News & Views, Ukraine
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2025 Plans for new ‘Collegium’ (and Seimas Law) to Glorify Holocaust’s June 1941 LAF Killers of their Jewish Neighbors
[LAST UPDATE. ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 19 MARCH 2025]
A Vilnius professor, a former foreign minister, and group of Conservative (Homeland Union) parliamentarians announce ‘collegium’ to glorify 1941 LAF (Lithuanian Activist Front / ‘White-Armbander’ ) Hitlerists who murdered their neighbors — effectively ‘initiating on the ground’ the Lithuanian Holocaust
25 June 2025 update: Member of the Seimas proposes law to legitimize the “declaration of independence” of the LAF and Hitler’s puppet “provisional government” by an act of parliament (reports in Lrytas.lt, 15mins.lt, and BNS).
The professor. Official announcement on website of the Seimas. Article citing former foreign minister. Article explaining that a new Seimas law will mandate spending on far-right history revisionism to smear the historic narrative (the Western narrative, the Holocaust history narrative) as Kremlin-inspired (!) while glorifying the killers of thousands of innocent Jewish neighbors. Far from helping the name of today’s free and democratic Lithuania, this Seimas proposal brings self-inflicted damage of the worst sort — glorifying the perpetrators of the early days and weeks of the Lithuanian Holocaust.
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OUR TAKE
Leonidas Donskis answers Prof. Girnius from the grave:
‘When will the truth finally set us free?’
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NOW IN ENGLISH TRANSLATION:
Posted in Antisemitism & Bias, Celebrations of Fascism, Christian-Jewish Issues, Collaborators Glorified, Legacy of 23 June 1941, Lithuania, Lithuania's Jewish Community Issues, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory
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Books in the Debate (a DefendingHistory.com selection)
[last update]
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see also: BOOKS SECTION
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Not yet published:
Michael Shafir, Competitive Martyrdom [working title].
Draft manuscript of the book circulated to colleagues (for comments and criticism) before the author’s sudden death in 2022. See Defending History’s Michael Shafir section. It is hoped that Professor Shafir’s heirs will enable rapid publication of this major and indispensable work in the field.
2025
Saulius Sužiedėlis,
Reactions, reviews, and citations:
Clemens Heni: Mit Kojak gegen die Rot=Braun-Ideologie
2024
Chris Heath, No Road Leading Back: An Improbable Escape from the Nazis and the Tangled Way We Tell the Story of the Holocaust
Review by Roland Binet.
2023
Paul Srodecki and Daria Kozlova (eds), War and Remembrance. World War II and the Holocaust in the Memory Politics of Post-Socialist Europe
Posted in Books, History, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Rūta Vanagaitė
Tagged Alexander Gendler (Khurbn), Dan Rabinowitz, Holocaust in Lithuania, Jonas Noreika, Leyb Koniuchowsky & Jonathan Boyarin, Nazi's Grnddaughter, Ruta Vanagaite & Christoph Dieckmann, Ruta Vanagaite + Efraim Zuroff, Saulius Suziedelis, Silvia Foti
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Defending History Issues and Projects (Summer of 2025)
NOTE: Please come visit and look through DefendingHistory.com (recent reports here). Please consider supporting these causes. Thank you.
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ISSUES
Note: Ordering not in order of importance. Weighting of specific issues in is in the heart of the beholder and depends very much on individual interests and priorities.
Posted in News & Views
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Updates to the New German Brigade Near the World War II Jewish Partisan Fort in Lithuania
EUROPE’S ONLY SURVIVING JEWISH PARTISAN FORT
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VILNIUS—There have been two new developments in the saga of Germany’s Forty-Fifth Armoured Brigade, to be established in the forests adjacent to the remains of Europe’s last Jewish partisan fort, where around one hundred escapes from the Vilna Ghetto lived and fought the Nazis and their local collaborators during the Holocaust. See report.
The 20 June updates:
Posted in A 21st Century Campaign Against Lithuanian Holocaust Survivors?, Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky (Fania Brancovskaja): 1922-2024, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Politics of Memory, Remnants of Europe's Last Jewish Anti-Nazi Partisan Fort
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Mid June 2025 Events in Vilnius
EVENTS | VILNIUS
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On Yivo’s 100th:
Dr. Jonathan Brent, director of Yivo, speaking on Yivo’s 100th anniversary at National Picture Gallery Tuesday 17 June at 3 PM.
Professor David E. Fishman (JTS), speaking on Yivo during the war years at the National Library’s Judaic Studies Center Tuesday 17 June at 5 PM. Registration.
Posted in Events, In the Era of Yivo's 100th, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views
Tagged Boris Maftsir, Crisis, Dr. Jonathan Brent, Prof. David E. Fishman, Prof. Saulius Suziedelis, War and the Holocaust in Lithuania, Yivo
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Bravo to Vilnius Jewish Community for Standing Up for Democracy & Continuity of Jewish Life in Lithuania
OPINION | LITHUANIAN JEWISH COMMUNITY ISSUES | LITVAK AFFAIRS | GOOD WILL FOUNDATION | STOLEN ELECTION SAGA | AJC MISADVENTURES IN LITHUANIA
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OPINION
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VILNIUS—The following is an edited and updated version of Dovid Katz’s post on Facebook today in reaction to the statement posted today by the Vilnius Jewish Community (VJC) on its website and on Facebook. An English translation of the statement appears in Defending History.
[Updates: See also the media report in Alfa.lt; the statement posted by Jewish Heritage Lita (JHL) on its website; Defending History’s newly compiled section, Lithuania: a Textbook Case of East European Restitution for Lost Jewish Assets Abused to Dismantle and Diminish a Vibrant Jewish Community, which includes contributions over the years by Ruta Bloshtein, Alexander Chernov, Pinchos Fridberg, Simon Gurevich, Leon Kaplan, Arkady Kurliandchik, Zecharya Olickij, Josif Parasonis, the late Jacob Pilansky, among others.]
BRAVO to our democratic Vilnius Jewish Community (which represents over 1,600 Jewish people in Vilnius, constituting the majority of today’s small Jewish community in Lithuania) for proudly standing up and speaking out on this week’s monkey elections at the corrupt “Lithuanian Jewish Community” (which is state-sponsored, via “restitution” no less, deriving from the property values of the annihilated prewar religious institutions). Their statement is on Facebook and their website.
In the middle of the 2017 election campaign, when a certain conflict-of-interest passport lawyer saw that her opponent was winning, the rules were changed mid-campaign to disenfranchise the living Jewish people of Lithuania and replace them with kangaroo “associations” comprising entities themselves receiving monies and/or other benefits from the same restitution.
Posted in "Good Will Foundation" (Jewish Restitution in Lithuania), A Stolen Election and a Small Jewish Community's Protest, Dovid Katz, Lithuania, Lithuania: Textbook Case of East European Restitution (for Lost Jewish Assets) Abused to Dismantle a Vibrant Jewish Community, Lithuania's Jewish Community Issues, Litvak Affairs, News & Views
Tagged American Jewish Committee (AJC), B'nai B'rith International, Conference on American Zionist Movement (AZM), Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, Dovid Katz, Faina Kukliansky, Geros valios fondas, Good Will Foundation (Lithuania), Jewish life in Lithuania, Lieuvos zydu bendruomene, Lithuanian Jewish Community, National Coalition Supporting Eurasian Jewry, Vilniaus zydu bendruomene, Vilnius Jewish community, World Jewish Restitution Organization (WJRO), World ORT
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Vilnius Jewish Community Issues Public Statement on Sham Elections of Restitution-fueled ‘Official’ Jewish Community
OPINION | LITHUANIAN JEWISH COMMUNITY ISSUES | LITVAK AFFAIRS | GOOD WILL FOUNDATION | STOLEN ELECTION SAGA | AJC MISADVENTURES IN LITHUANIA
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VILNIUS—The following is an English translation of the statement posted today by the Vilnius Jewish Community (VJC) on its website and on Facebook.
Among reports and reactions: in Alfa.lt; the statement posted by Jewish Heritage Lita (JHL); Dovid Katz’s post on n Facebook and in Defending History; Defending History’s newly compiled section, Lithuania: a Textbook Case of East European Restitution for Lost Jewish Assets Abused to Dismantle and Diminish a Vibrant Jewish Community, which includes contributions over the years by Ruta Bloshtein, Alexander Chernov, Pinchos Fridberg, Simon Gurevich, Leon Kaplan, Arkady Kurliandchik, Zecharya Olickij, Josif Parasonis, the late Jacob Pilansky, among others.]
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Statement of the Vilnius Jewish Community
The Vilnius Jewish Community announces that it will not participate in the reporting and election meeting of the Lithuanian Jewish Community to be held on June 6 of this year.
Posted in "Good Will Foundation" (Jewish Restitution in Lithuania), A Stolen Election and a Small Jewish Community's Protest, Lithuania, Lithuania: Textbook Case of East European Restitution (for Lost Jewish Assets) Abused to Dismantle a Vibrant Jewish Community, Lithuania's Jewish Community Issues, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Vilnius
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Chris Heath’s ‘No Road Leading Back’ on Ponar and on How we Remember the Holocaust
BOOKS | PONAR | LITHUANIA
BOOK REVIEW
by Roland Binet (De Panne, Belgium)
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In 2016, Chris Heath read an item in the New York Times about a tunnel that had been discovered “at a Holocaust killing site”. It was referring to
Ponar near Vilna (Yiddish Ponár, Polish Ponary, today’s Paneriai outside Vilnius, capital city of Lithuania). It is around ten kilometers (six miles) southwest of Vilnius city center. This caught his attention and he decided to write a book about this heroic feat. The main title is borrowed from two lines that Shmerke Kaczerginski had written in his poem “Shtiler, Shtiler” (Quieter, quieter) that was put to music and sung in the Vilna Ghetto.
Ponar: 100,000 persons killed by bullets from summer 1941 to spring of 1944, about 70% of them Jews including women, children, and the elderly.
Ponar: List of twelve escapees from Ponar who survived (April 1944): Josef Bielic, Abraham Blazer, Yitzhak Dogin, Yuli Farber, Shlomo Gol, David Kantorovich, Zalman Matzkin, Lejzer Owsiejczyk, Konstantin Potanin, Motke Zeidel, Adam Zinger, Peter Zinin
Posted in Books, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Opinion, Poland, Politics of Memory, Ponár (Ponary, Paneriai), Roland Binet
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Rašella Galinienė, Head of the Jewish Community of Shavl (Šiauliai, Lithuania) Protests an Inappropriate Memorial Plonked on a Holocaust Mass Grave
OPINION | CEMETERIES | COMMUNITY COMMEMORATION | LITHUANIA | LITVAK AFFAIRS | HUMAN RIGHTS
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Rašella Galinienė, elected head of the Jewish Community of Shavl (Šiauliai) speaks out to protest insensitive desecration of a Holocaust mass grave site where Jews of Yánishok (Joniškis) were massacred. Photo: Shavl Jewish Community.
Rašella Galinienė, elected head of the Jewish Community of Shavl (Šiauliai, northern Lithuania) has led a public call for removal of a series of sculptures erected by a nearby local government authority directly atop the actual graves, in the forest, of hundreds of murdered Jews of the shtetl Yánishok (or Yáneshik, today’s Joniškis). The issue has been reported on prominently in Lithuanian media, including on LRT TV, and the LRT news portal (where mechanical translation to English captures nearly all the text accurately). The media reports dwell on issues of permits, permissions, consultations and the difference of opinion between the Shavl community and the local authorities in the district where the forest mass grave is situated. They report accurately, that the late and long standing beloved leader of the Shavl community, Sania Kerbl (Kerbelis, 1963–2024) expressed — in concord with Jewish tradition and law of thousands of years standing — his staunch opposition to anything being constructed or erected on cemeteries and burial sites.
Posted in Commemorations for Destroyed Communities, Human Rights, Lithuania, Lithuania's Jewish Community Issues, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Opinion
Tagged Jewish cemeteries in Lithuania, Jewish Community of Shavl (Siauliai), Jewish mass graves in Lithuania, Joniskis, Rašella Galinienė, Sania Kerbel (Kerbelis), Yáneshik (Joniskis), Yánishok (Joniskis)
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Germany’s New Brigade in Lithuania (‘Panzerbrigade 45’): Right Near Remnants of the Last Anti-Nazi Jewish Partisan Fort in Europe
[LAST UPDATE (SEE AT END): 20 JUNE 2025]
LAST JEWISH PARTISAN FORT IN EASTERN EUROPE | POLITICS OF MEMORY | GERMANY | FANIA YOCHELES BRANTSOVSKY | LITVAK AFFAIRS
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OPINION
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VILNIUS—International media has reported in detail on last week’s military ceremonies in Vilnius celebrating the permanent installation of thousands of German soldiers as part of NATO forces in Lithuania, southernmost of the three Baltic republics. The new entity is “Germany’s 45th Armoured Brigade” (Panzerbrigade 45) that is also known as the “Lithuania Brigade”.
The Defending History community is a staunch supporter of the values and security needs of the European Union, NATO, the Western alliance of free and democratic nations, and has from day one condemned the medieval, barbaric February 2022 invasion and unleashing of mass death and destruction upon Ukraine by Putin’s Russian Federation forces. Our support includes reproducing a statement that has appeared for over a decade on p. 1 of DefendingHistory.com (right hand column). As stated there, adherence to the democratic values of the EU and the NATO alliance includes cherishing the free-speech right to criticize: efforts to rewrite Holocaust history by Eastern Europe’s ultranationalist far right; efforts to defame the victims, including Jewish partisans who fought valiantly against the Nazis; efforts to disseminate Double Genocide revisionism in the realm of Holocaust and World War II history; efforts to glorify Holocaust collaborators and perpetrators; efforts to curtail free speech by criminalizing or delegitimizing views that oppose these efforts.
Posted in A 21st Century Campaign Against Lithuanian Holocaust Survivors?, Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky (Fania Brancovskaja): 1922-2024, Germany, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, Remnants of Europe's Last Jewish Anti-Nazi Partisan Fort
Tagged Birgit Kraemer, Chancellor Merz, Fania Brancovskaja, Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky, Germany's "Lithuania Brigade", Germany's 45th Armoured Brigade, Jewish partisans in Lithuania, Jewish partisans in Vilna, Mantautas Sulskis, NATO in Lithuania, Panzerbrigade 45, Rūdninkai Forest, Rūdninkai training ground, Rūdninkų giria, Rudnítsker vald
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International Opposition to ‘New’ Proposals for Conference-Memorial Complex, with Seating Capacity for Thousands — in the Middle of the Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery
[last update]
BACKGROUND:
OLD VILNA JEWISH CEMETERY AT PIRAMÓNT
EARLIER OPPOSITION TO CONVENTION CENTER |
2023-2024 “WORKING GROUP” ON VILNA CEMETERY
LIST OF MEMBERS WHOSE MORAL CAPITULATION (ALL BUT THE NOBLE PROFESSOR SID LEIMAN) WILL FOREVER BE IN THE HISTORY
MOUNTING OPPOSITION TO THE NEW MUSEUM/MEMORIAL PROJECT
CEMETERIES & MASS GRAVES
HUMAN RIGHTS (INCLUDING THE RIGHT OF THE DECEASED TO BE LEFT IN PEACE IN BURIAL GROUNDS PURCHASED IN PERPETUITY)
CHRISTIAN-JEWISH RELATIONS
See Note below
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Videos Online
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Written statements:
Rabbi Elchonon Baron
Ruta Bloshtein
Rabbi S. J. Feffer
Bernard Fryshman
Dovid Katz
Andrius Kulikauskas
Sid Leiman
Posted in Defense of Old Jewish Cemeteries and Mass Grave Sites, Human Rights, Lithuania, Lithuania's Jewish Community Issues, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery at Piramónt (in Šnipiškės / Shnípishok), Opinion, Politics of Memory
Tagged American Jewish Committee (AJC), Conference of European Rabbis (CER), Good Will Foundation (GWF), human rights & cemeteries, Jewish cemetery at Piramont (Snipiskes/Shnipishok), Lithuanian Jewish Community (LJC), Old Vilnius (Vilna) Jewish cemetery
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Dovid Katz’s Lecture in Honor of Yivo’s 100th at the Vilnius Jewish Public Library (video)
YIDDISH AFFAIRS | YIVO
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VILNIUS—The Vilnius Jewish Public Library today posted its video of Dovid Katz’s lecture, “Yivo’s 100th: origins, dreams, successes, failures, conflicts, and — everlasting contributions” delivered at the library on 17 April 2025. It is available on youtube. Simultaneous translation into Lithuanian was provided by Judita Glauberzonaitė. The event was chaired by the library’s director Liana Jagniatinsky.
Posted in Dovid Katz, In the Era of Yivo's 100th, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Yiddish Affairs
Tagged Dovid Katz + YIVO, Yivo + Vilnius, Yivo's 100th anniversary
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Vilnius’s Resident Rabbi for Last 30 Years is Called ‘Mr. Krinsky’ in Latest Hate Piece from State-Restitution-fueled ‘Official’ Jewish Community
[2 May 2025 update at end of post]
OPINION | DOCUMENTS | LITHUANIAN JEWISH COMMUNITY AFFAIRS | A STOLEN ELECTION | CHABAD IN VILNIUS | HUMAN RIGHTS
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OPINION
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VILNIUS—Even people who “thought they had seen everything” were taken aback a week ago, when without prior warning Vilnius’s only functioning synagogue was closed down on the occasion of the first seyder night of Passover, one of the most sacred Jewish calendar days of the year. The “explanation” did come shortly thereafter in the form of an official 13 April 2025 statement on the official website of the restitution fueled “Jewish (Litvak) Community of Lithuania” (the “LJC” as is it is still known from the long time title “Lithuanian Jewish Community”, LZB in Lithuanian). That is the “community” that disenfranchised virtually all the remaining few thousand Jewish people in Lithuania, by changing the system of voting (in the middle of an election campaign season!) from choice by community members to that of “associations” mostly benefiting from restitution funds. This transpired during the allegedly rigged 2017 community elections. See also the contemporary JTA reports (here and here). The official community has received tens of millions of dollars from the government in restitution.
Posted in "Good Will Foundation" (Jewish Restitution in Lithuania), Chabad in Vilnius, Documents, Human Rights, Lithuania, Lithuania's Jewish Community Issues, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Opinion
Tagged American Jewish Committee + Lithuania, Faina Kukliansky, Geros valios fondas, Good Will Foundation, Jewish (Litvak) Community of Lithuania, Passover 2025 in Vilnius, Rabbi Sholom Ber Krinsky, Vilnius Jewish community
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The Australian who Warned of the Holocaust and was Executed by Fascists
HISTORY | AUSTRALIA
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by Michael Samaras
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Ted Dickinson was one of the most remarkable of the International Brigaders, those prescient individuals who fought the fascist forces of Franco, Hitler and Mussolini in the Spanish Civil War. He was born in England and as a child migrated with his family to Australia. At 20, he joined the politically radical Industrial Workers of the World and became one of its leading identities. He was physically impressive, with brown hair, blue eyes, and was described as “strikingly handsome” with a carriage as “straight as a ramrod”.
In 1928, as the economy worsened, Dickinson, with his friend Jim McNeill, campaigned for a better deal for the unemployed and led marches, protests and anti-eviction actions. The pair started a newspaper, Direct Action, and it was because of its radical articles that Dickinson was charged with sedition and imprisoned for six months.
Posted in Australia, History, Michael Samaras, News & Views
Tagged Jim McNeill, Michael Samaras, Spanish Civil War, Ted Dickinson, Tommy Bloomfield
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Prof. Girnius Tries Again to Glorify the LAF that in 1941 Killed Thousands of Jewish Neighbors, Unleashing the Lithuanian Holocaust
OPINION | LEGACY OF 23 JUNE 1941 | 2011 ATTEMPTS TO SANITIZE THE LAF | LAF’S INTENTIONS IN WRITING | ŠKIRPA’S PLANS | COLLABORATORS GLORIFIED | LITHUANIAN JEWISH AFFAIRS | CHRISTIAN-JEWISH RELATIONS
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OPINION
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The eminent Harvard and Univ. of Chicago educated American-Lithuanian professor and public affairs analyst, Kęstutis Girnius, tried a decade and a half ago to mobilize support for a far-right inspired dry-clean of the “Lithuanian Activist Front” (LAF, Lietuvių aktyvistų frontas, “white armbanders”) which was the 1941 organization that did not shoot a rabbit when the Soviets were in power (1940-1941) but began to murder thousands of innocent Jewish neighbors the moment the Soviet army started its panicked flight eastward, and there was no authority to stop them. Hitler’s local henchmen declared an “independence” that included the oath of loyalty to Adolf Hitler, the commitment to rid Lithuania of all its Jews, and the unleashing of barbaric murder before the Germans even arrived or set up their control. Any true friend of Lithuania will understand that this is the kind of pro-fascist revisionism that beautiful, modern, tolerant, democratic Lithuania needs like a hole in the head.
Girnius’s gushing public announcement of the new initiative to whitewash the LAF was announced in an article in Delfi.lt this week, heralding the formation of a group of Conservative (Homeland Union party) members of parliament who are forming a “collegium” for this task. If that’s correct, it would, in one fell swoop, undermine the magnificent contributions of so many great truth-telling Lithuanian ethicists of the past three and a half decades, including Vytenis Povilas Andriukaitis, Evaldas Balčiūnas, Saulius Beržinis, Aleksandras Bosas, Valentinas Brandišauskas, Algirdas Brazauskas, Leonidas Donskis, Silvia Foti, Andrius Kulikauskas, Liudas Truska, Rūta Vanagaitė, Nida Vasiliauskaitė, Tomas Venclova, Linas Vildžiūnas, and numerous others.
Posted in Celebrations of Fascism, Christian-Jewish Issues, Collaborators Glorified, Dovid Katz, History, Legacy of 23 June 1941, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory
Tagged Aleksandras Bosas, Algirdas Brazauskas, Andrius Kulikauskas, Dovid Katz, Glorification of Holocaust collaborators (Lithuania), Holocaust in Lithuania, June 1941 Uprising, Kestutis Girnius, LAF (Lithuanian Activist Front), Leonidas Donskis, Linaz Vildziunas, Lithuania's June 1941 uprising, Liudas Truska, Ruta Vanagaite, Silvia Foti, Tomas Venclova, Valentinas Brandisauskas, Vytenis Andriukaitis
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Another Kind of Final Solution?
OPINION | MUSEUMS | LITHUANIA | LITVAK AFFAIRS | YIDDISH AFFAIRS
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by Dalia Epstein (Dalija Epšteinaitė)
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When speaking about the Holocaust in Lithuania, it is customary to cite 95%, that is, more than two hundred thousand people. This is not only the lives lost, but also schools, synagogues, kheyders, yeshivas, books, newspapers. This is the white tablecloth and fresh challah of Shabbos, these are the Sabbath conversations in the bes-medresh, which tailors, blacksmiths, carpenters, and tinsmiths in the shtetls wait for all week long, for whom conversations about the Torah are a long-awaited spiritual respite. Today, in such a former synagogue you can see a carpentry workshop, a fire department, a gym, a bathhouse, a funeral services business, and at best a library… After all, there are no more Jews. In the town of Butrimonys (Yiddish: Butrimánts), the name of the former owner, Pertzikovich, has been preserved above the entrance to one house. We stopped to take a photo. A young woman with a little girl came out.
“Yes, Pertzikovich used to live here. And now we live here,” she said calmly and walked on.
We are witnessing the consignment of memory to oblivion. The language spoken, read and written by Jews in the towns and cities of Lithuania has been destroyed. The Nazi occupation exterminated 95% of Yiddish speakers, the bearers of a culture that had suddenly blossomed so brightly in the 1920s and 30s.
Posted in Dalia Epstein (Dalija Epšteinaitė), Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Museums, News & Views, Opinion, Yiddish Affairs
Tagged Abraham Sutzkever, Asya Turgel, Butrimants, Butrimonys, Dalia Epstein, Dalija Epšteinaitė, Dovid Umru, Jewish State Museum of Lithuania, Museum of Culture and Identity of Lithuanian Jews, Odile Suganas, Rozalia Shabad-Gawronska, Vilna Gaon Museum of Jewish History, Yiddish in Vilnius
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Claims Conference Should Think Again Before Inadvertently Legitimizing East European Far-Right Holocaust Revisionism
OPINION | THE RED-BROWN COMMISSION | FANIA YOCHELES BRANTSOVSKY | YITZHAK ARAD | DOUBLE GENOCIDE | LITHUANIA | LITVAK AFFAIRS
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OPINION
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VILNIUS—Everybody makes mistakes, even august, storied and splendid international organizations. As in personal affairs, so in conference rooms, the secret is in the ability to say so and make a change, remembering the adage attributed to Mark Twain, along the lines of it being much easier to fool a person than to get them to admit they have been fooled.
The Claims Conference (Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany) has just allowed its vaunted name and logo to appear on the publicity for events in Palanga and Plunge, Lithuania organized by one of the major engines of East European Holocaust revisionism. That entity is the state-sponsored “International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupational Regimes,” which local diplomats have long dubbed for short “the Red-Brown Commission” starting in 2008 when the Commission reacted with utter silence to prosecutors’ launching of absurd and cruel kangaroo pretrial war crimes investigations into two of Vilnius’s most beloved Holocaust survivors, Dr. Rachel Margolis (1921-2015) and Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky (1922-2024). Please skim through the saga.
Posted in "Red-Brown Commission", Double Genocide: The New Form of Holocaust Revisionism & Denial, Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky (Fania Brancovskaja): 1922-2024, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Opinion
Tagged Clemens Heni, Danny Ben-Moshe, Dov Levin, Efraim Zuroff, Holocaust in Lithuania, Holocaust Studies, International Commission for the Evaluation, Joseph Melamed, Marc Radomsky, Red-Brown Commission, Ronaldas Racinskas, Yehuda Bauer
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