The English version of a clandestine plan (dated 21 Nov 2009) to thwart honorable restitution of prewar communal Jewish property to the Jewish Community of Lithuania was leaked to this website today. Incredibly, the plan was proposed by the ruling party in the country’s parliament without informing the government’s long standing negotiating partner — the Jewish Community of Lithuania.
The plot is diabolically simple: to dispense with the communal restitution under negotiation for over a decade (and agreed by every other new-accession EU state), and to ensure that not a single Holocaust Survivor sees any benefit in his or her lifetime. Instead, funds would be poured into ‘morbid tourism’ projects, particularly the white elephant follyesque rebuild of the Great Synagogue (destroyed during and after World War II) as part of the ‘Disneyland Vilna-Ghetto Dead-Jew Tourist Park’ which is anathema to the country’s living Jewish community.
The most offensive part of the document is the passage claiming that the living remnant Jewish survivor community does ‘not have any direct connection with the victims and communities’. This is a diplomatic reformulation of the antisemitic canard that the Jewish community of Lithuania is not legitimate. The claim is part of the wider strategy of pretended friendship toward foreign Jews and prewar Jewry that goes hand in hand with disdain for living local Jews.
Text of the document in English translation. A July 2009 article written in a similar spirit by the former director of the ‘Litvak Foundation‘ [!] claimed that two-thirds of Lithuanian Jews are ‘aliens from the East’. Report here.
The annual Uzgavenes festival, celebrated throughout Lithuania, again featured costumes and behavior making fun of – and perpetuating the worst stereotypes of – Roma and Jews (‘and monsters’). Roma and Jews comprise two of the country’s smallest and weakest minorities. Most of both communities were murdered during the Holocaust by the Nazis (with massive voluntary participation in the killings by locals). Today, progressive forces continue to live in hope that political, academic, legal, religious and cultural opinion makers in the country will rise to the occasion of explaining the essence, evil and dangers of such rampant racism unconvincingly disguised as the majority’s ‘national ethnographic tradition’. See below at 2008 (→ 6 Feb) for 
The Shabad statue in Vilnius’s old town (wartime territory of the Vilna Ghetto) was defaced in a paint attack. 
According to a 
One of the novel forms of antisemitism to emerge from the post-Soviet Baltics revels in diminishing Nazism and ‘growing’ Communism (often regarded as a ‘Jewish plot’) in a macabre equation, to produce a model of ‘equality’ for naive westerners 
Minutes after the German Embassy in Vilnius issued a press release announcing that it had 
Antisemitic reaction on Lithuania’s main news portal came within minutes of the German embassy’s press release announcing its award to anti-Nazi Jewish partisan veteran Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky, librarian of the Vilnius Yiddish Institute. The award is the president’s Federal Cross of Merit. It was presented to her by Germany’s ambassador to Lithuania Hans-Peter Annen in a ceremony at his embassy in Vilnius. Details at 
