[updated to May 2013]
“One of the most important statements in the article is that the swastika is banned by Lithuanian law, something that Katz and others have refused to acknowledge.”
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“Fact: It is illegal to display the swastika in Lithuania today.”
Chronology of events, including the United Nations Human Rights Committee statement of 2012, provided below…
Last Thursday, 3 November, an article I’d submitted to the Jerusalem Post for consideration appeared on the op-ed page (PDF of the print edition here). In democratic societies, sending an opinion piece to a respectable publication, signing it with one’s real name, and opening it (and oneself) to further open debate and discussion are rather standard. As usual, I linked to the article on my Facebook page, expecting some to agree and some to disagree, moving debate forward.
But a number of Facebook Friends who did not react on my page, or any other open forum, did for some reason find it appropriate to join a kind of witch hunt against the article and its author on a page of a “Secret Group” called Lietuva be neonacizmo (Lithuania Without Neo-Nazism), located at: www.facebook.com/groups/135816956486382.
The original discussion of 3 and 4 November 2011 is available here. A full English translation is appended below and is also available as PDF.
A few friends asked me if I could attend a book presentation in Kaunas, since they couldn’t make it. The book is called Undigested Past: The Holocaust in Lithuania by Robert van Voren. It was published in English first as part of a series by the Rodopi publishing house on Eastern Europe. I’d never heard of van Voren, but people told me he was known for his books on psychiatric abuses in the Soviet Union. The poster for the event proclaimed boldly in Lithuanian that the conference’s official language would be English, which made me smirk, but an English-language version of the poster became available on the morning of the event.
Recent developments suggest Holocaust remembrance has fallen by the wayside as a key element of Jewish Foreign Policy, at least as far as Lithuania is concerned.
Holocaust remembrance is a central plank of Jewish Foreign Policy (JFP), a term that encompasses how Israel and Diaspora organizations act on issues of common Jewish concern. The establishment of Yad Vashem in 1953 and the Eichmann trial in 1961 showed how central the memory of the Holocaust was to Israeli public and foreign policy.
Yivo’s director, one of the current Lithuanian government’s staunchest PR providers in the west (see here, here, here, here), recently told the English Forward that ‘he would continue to work with the Lithuanian government to reach a permanent settlement over the archive’, implying that the Yivo Board would be making its decision in due course.
During my dissertation research in Rivne, I’ve been going through a number of contemporary Volhynian newspapers for articles on a range of historical matters. As a historian of the Second World War, I do not tend to spend as much time with contemporary publications, yet at the end of the day, every activity and research experience is a lesson in some manner when you’re “in country” working.
I spent time working through what I already understood to be the right-wing nationalist newspaper, Volyn’, which is a Rivne oblast’ level paper that comes out once a week. The paper sees itself as the reincarnation of the Nazi occupation newspaper of the same name, which was edited by Volhynian writer Ulas Samchuk, if that tells you anything about the orientation just to start out.
When one orders a run of a paper, you get an entire year at once bound together. I’ll now take you through some of what I saw in the collection for 2002.
The governing establishments in Eastern European states sometimes produce red-brown symbols as part of the wider campaign to give the notion of red-brown equality an aura of official sanctioned status. The effects are obvious: People are being desensitized to the swastika, Soviet symbols are ‘artistically’ (i.e. via political kitsch) recombinated into the new Dual Equal Evil symbols making the revisionist history ‘true’. Severe pain is caused to families of Holocaust Survivors and anti-Nazi Soviet war veterans alike. The continued silence of the European Union, the OSCE and NATO encourages the drift toward the far right, which includes clean-up of the image of Nazi collaborators in elite circles, and glorification of Nazi symbols in more uncouth environments.
Tel Aviv attorney Joe Melamed, head of the Association of Lithuanian Jews, celebrating Dr. Rachel Margolis’s 90th birthday in Rechovot
Left her safe haven with righteous Christians to join her family in the Vilna Ghetto. Joined the Jewish underground anti-Nazi resistance. Witness to creation of the Yiddish Partisan Hymn.
Escaped to join the partisans and fought valiantly against the Nazis in the forests of Lithuania. The only one in her family to survive the Holocaust.
Volunteered for the short-lived Jewish museum after the war.
Dedicated half a century to Biology at Vilnius University.
Helped establish the Green House Holocaust exhibit. Rediscovered, deciphered and published Kazimierz Sakowicz’s diary of Ponár. Author of a remarkable memoir. Beloved guide, lecturer and teacher on Jewish Vilna and the Holocaust.
Target of a campaign of defamation by Vilnius prosecutors, the “Lithuanian Human Rights Association” and other far-right Holocaust-revisionist elites.
Afraid to return to her beloved Vilna for one last visit. Lithuanian government refuses to reach out to her, while prosecutors repeat threats on kangaroo ‘war crimes investigation’ (most recently for the record in the 2012 documentary ‘Rewriting History’)
VIDEO INTERVIEW WITH RACHEL MARGOLIS: 1 and 2
MORE INFORMATION AND TRIBUTES:
RACHEL MARGOLIS FACT SHEET ♦ FORMER UK PRIME MINISTER GORDON BROWN ♦ 5 MEMBERS OF THE US CONGRESS ♦ ACADEMIC STUDIES PRESS ♦ KEENE STATE COLLEGE ♦ SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE ♦ LORD JANNER OF BRAUNSTONE ♦ LATE LITHUANIAN PRIME MINISTER ALGIRDAS BRAZAUSKAS ♦ ISRAELI AMBASSADOR CHEN IVRI APTER ♦ ADL DIRECTOR ABRAHAM FOXMAN ♦ NCSJ ♦ METRO WEST HOLOCAUST COUNCIL ♦ LEIVICK HOUSE TEL AVIV ♦ JEWISH CHRONICLE ♦ ALGEMEINER JOURNAL (& 2) ♦ RACHEL MARGOLIS.COM
OCTOBER 2012 UPDATE: VIDEO RELEASED OF THE LATE AMBASSADOR CHEN IVRI APTER’S 2009 SPEECH AT LEIVICK HOUSE, TEL AVIV
Coverage in DefendingHistory.com:
OVERVIEWS HERE & HERE; 7 MAY 2008; 19 JUNE 2009; 28 OCTOBER 2009; 27 JANUARY 2010; 28 OCTOBER 2010; 3 JANUARY 2011; 5 MAY 2011; 28 AUGUST 2011; 23 SEPTEMBER 2011.
VILNIUS. One of the staples of diplomatic life here is the annual Hungarian National Day reception hosted by the Hungarian Embassy in Vilnius. Under the leadership of the previous ambassador to Lithuania, HE Péter Horváth Noszkó, his nation’s embassy became a locus of inter-community and inter-cultural dialogue that helped further civil society in the Lithuanian capital. He thereby raised his country’s profile to that of an open forum par excellence, where all — not least minority groups — could find a place here in this corner of the European Table.
Year to commemorate the perpetrators ran parallel with a year to commemorate the Holocaust, too; One in a series of ‘dual tracks’ to satisfy at once the antisemitic, Holocaust-revisionist Far Right and foreign Jewish groups
I commend Didier Bertin’s knowledgeable and sensitive observations in his article “Lithuania and the Memory of the Holocaust.” My comments here are more in the form of a PS to Mr. Bertin’s words. My take-off point is his reference to the term “Double Genocide,” a government-endorsed concept that has been bandied about in Lithuanian political circles in recent times. But more about this later. Mr. Bertin borrows the term for application in a different dual context: the original genocide of the Jewish people and the current movement on the part of the Lithuanian government to neutralize if not to obliterate the remembrance of the Holocaust.
Joe Melamed in his Tel Aviv office
Report in Haaretz by Yossi Melman;
DefendingHistory.com reports here and here;
Geoff Vasil in the Jewish Chronicle
Today’s “EPP Hearing on the Commission’s Report: The Memory of the Crimes Committed by Totalitarian Regimes in Europe” (PDF) at the European Parliament in Brussels was a polished and triumphal affair that has reconfirmed — if reconfirmation is necessary — how right MEP Edward McMillan-Scott was in 2009 when he refused to accede to his then party, the British Conservatives, entering the political European Parliament tent of the far-right ECR (European Conservatives and Reformists), when the latter chose as leader a politician with a record of antisemitism and Holocaust Obfuscation, one for whom “Jewish apologies for communism” was a condition for recognition of the facts of the Holocaust.
Joe Melamed in his Tel Aviv office
According to a recent report on Delfi.lt, Lithuanian MP Gintaras Songaila, who has expressed support for the neo-Nazi marches through central Vilnius on Lithuania’s Independence Day, has recently begun disseminating a brochure to his fellow Lithuanian parliamentarians about alleged Polish atrocities against Lithuanians from before and during World War II. The brochure is based on a book by Algimantas Liekis called Black Pages in Lithuanian History.
Activists in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv wearing uniforms of the former Ukrainian Insurgent Army (known as UPA, from its Ukrainian language initials) marched in a large scale event in the city center today.
Report in Haaretz by Yossi Melman;
DefendingHistory.com reports here and here;
Geoff Vasil in the Jewish Chronicle
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A BNS (Baltic News Service) report released today quotes the foreign ministry as saying for the record today that ‘The attitude of the Russian institutions that by condemning some crimes against humanity (the Stalinist crimes), other crimes, i.e. the crimes of Nazism, are being rehabilitated, shall be regarded as very odd’.
The nation’s prime minister, Andrius Kubilius, weighed in more ardently. In an Lrytas.lt report (which credits ELTA), he is quoted as saying: ‘Thanks to Lithuania’s active policy it is being understood better and more clearly throughout the EU that Stalin’s crimes against humanity need to be judged in the same way Hitler’s crimes against humanity are judged. And not just Stalin’s [crimes], but [those] of the entire Soviet period […].’
The European Union has as one of its main tasks the promotion of cordial understanding between the peoples of Europe and, consequently, it must be careful about the history of the continent as it is being taught. One of the reasons for the foundation of the Union was to bring together peoples that were previously enemies, in two world wars and numerous other conflicts.
