M U S I C
by Roland Binet (Braine-l’Alleud, Belgium)
THE AUTHOR’S MUSICAL COMPOSITIONS:
I War
II Ghetto
III The Killing Pits
IV Liberation
V Remembrance
Arts
The Jewish Tragedy in the Baltic States
Posted in Arts, Latvia, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Music, News & Views, Roland Binet
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Artists Knew, Allied Leaders Kept Silent
O P I N I O N
by Roland Binet (Braine-l’Alleud, Belgium)
When I was in New York last year, I saw an extraordinary exhibition of paintings by Marc Chagall, “War, Exile and Love” at the Jewish Museum. The focus was on the works he produced during his years of exile in the United States. This exhibition, well attended, shed an interesting light on what the artist knew about the horrific events unfolding in Europe at the time of his sojourn in the United States.
Posted in Arts, History, Human Rights, Museums, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, Roland Binet, United Kingdom, United States
Tagged Jan Karski, Roland Binet, Szmul Zygielbojm, What did the Allies know about the Holocaust?
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Raising Cain on the Resurrection of Abel
O P I N I O N
by Geoff Vasil
And the Lord God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done? And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat. Genesis 3:13
And he said, What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground. Genesis 4:10
Driving east out of Rokiškis, fields give way to forest, and the lake country leads on to strange and wild hills in an abandoned quarter of the country bordering Latvia. The lake country is beautiful, almost alpine in its effect, and spotted with small settlements and villages of varying sizes, some even boasting gas stations and schools.
Posted in "Red-Brown Commission", Arts, Christian-Jewish Issues, Collaborators Glorified, Foreign Ministries: Holocaust Politics Abuse?, Geoff Vasil, Lithuania, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, Rákishok (Rokiškis), Symbology
Tagged Genocide Center in Vilnius, Geoff Vasil, Lithuania, Obeliai
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Latvian State Dance Troupe Displays Nazi Swastika
R E P O R T / O P I N I O N
by Graeme Atkinson (Hope Not Hate) and Monica Lowenberg (DefendingHistory.com)
Source: HOPE not hate/DefendingHistory.com Sunday, 24 November 2013.
Posted in Antisemitism & Bias, Arts, Celebrations of Fascism, Human Rights, Latvia, Monica Lowenberg, News & Views, Opinion, Racism
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A Musical Tribute to the Rumbula Victims
M U S I C / O P I N I O N
by Roland Binet (Braine-l’Alleud, Belgium)
SOUND TRACKS OF THE AUTHOR’S COMPOSITIONS:
Rumbula
Threnody
Posted in Arts, Latvia, Litvak Affairs, Music, News & Views, Opinion, Roland Binet
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Keep the Local History Out of Mind?
REVIEW OF KEEP ME IN MIND
by Geoff Vasil
The Contemporary Art Center’s reading room in Vilnius is hosting an unusual-for-Lithuania Holocaust event called Keep Me in Mind. Briefly, visitors are invited to wander among different tables where good-looking and polite people await them with small boxes and sheaves of papers. When you sit down the narrator at the table tells the story of an individual Holocaust survivor, from childhood to the present. Almost all of the survivors seem to now live in Haifa, Israel. One survivor, Benjamin Ginzburg, came from Vilnius.
Posted in "Red-Brown Commission", Arts, Geoff Vasil, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory
Tagged "Keep me in Mind", Geoff Vasil, Holocaust in Lithuania, Holocaust Politics
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Reviews and Coverage of the Australian Documentary Film “Rewriting History”
[date of last update]
www.Rewriting-History.org
FACEBOOK PAGE
US SCREENING TOUR 2013
The film features exclusive commentary by historians Efraim Zuroff and Konrad Kwiet; Survivors Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky and Dobke Yonis; Vilnius activists: former Green House Holocaust museum director Rachel Kostanian and former Vilnius University Yiddish professor Dovid Katz; European parliamentarians Denis MacShane, John Mann, Martin Schulz, Gert Weisskirchen; Sensational responses from Lithuanian government officials including red-brown commission boss Ronaldas Račinskas and the prosecutor, Rimvydas Valentukevičius, who “investigates” Holocaust survivors (none of whom were ever charged with anything or received a public apology); MEP Vytautas Landsbergis later withheld permission for inclusion of his own taped interview…
Posted in Arts, Australia, Danny Ben-Moshe, Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky (Fania Brancovskaja): 1922-2024, Film, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Rachel Kostanian
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“Rewriting History” on the Road in the USA
Rewriting History: New Documentary Film on the Shocking New Holocaust Revisionism in Eastern Europe
REVIEWS OF REWRITING HISTORY
Film’s website ◊ Sign the Seventy Years Declaration ◊ Donate HERE
◊
April 28th 2013 in LA
Continue reading
Posted in Arts, Danny Ben-Moshe, Events, Film, Lithuania, News & Views, Politics of Memory, United States
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Rachel Kostanian, Head of Vilnius’s ‘Green House’ and Champion of Holocaust Truth, Featured in New Documentary
Rachel Kostanian, the famed one-woman bastion holding off the state-sponsored hordes of ultranationalist Holocaust revisionism, continues to lead The Green House, as the Holocaust section of Lithuania’s state Jewish museum is known. It is a small wooden structure atop a hall hidden by a long driveway, invisible from the street, in contrast to the other sections of the Jewish museum. In contrast to all the others, The Green House’s exhibits and texts narrate the simple truth about June 1941 and the role of the “white armbander” Nazi militias in initiating the genocide of Lithuanian Jewry, as well as the later and massive collaboration with and participation in the killing throughout the genocide of Lithuanian Jewry. Like others who stand up, and especially those in prestigious academic or cultural positions in Lithuania, she is being subjected to extensive official harassment, degradation, demotion and a campaign of psychological warfare including defamation (see for example, Esther Goldberg Gilbert’s first and second articles in 2010).
It is against this backdrop that Ms. Kostanian’s prominent inclusion, at four separate points, in Professor Danny Ben-Moshe’s new documentary, Rewriting History, acquires special significance here in Vilnius.
The film is available online. Rachel Kostanian’s four appearances are at the following time c odes:
11:16 to 12:12
17:47 to 19:47
21:10 to 21:34
31:20 to 33:16
Posted in Arts, Film, It Pays to Defend History: Success Over the Years..., Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Museums, News & Views, Rachel Kostanian
Tagged Rachel Kostanian, The Green House
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US Documentary Film Maker Releases Correspondence with Yad Vashem on Alliance with Lithuanian “Red-Brown Commission”
The American documentary film maker Richard Bloom, who has produced a number of documentaries on the Holocaust, today released for publication his recent correspondence with Yad Vashem. He said his decision was taken after he failed to receive substantive replies to his recent queries about Yad Vashem rejoining the Lithuanian government’s “red-brown commission.”
Posted in "Red-Brown Commission", Arts, Film, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, Yad Vashem and Lithuania
Tagged International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes in Lithuania, Richard Bloom, The Litvak Connection, Yad Vashem
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Deception Exposed: The New Documentary Film “Rewriting History”
F I L M
by Graeme Blundell
NOTE: This review appeared in today’s Australian. The original publication is available here and here.
This is one of those documentaries that is so compelling and so confronting it leaves you stunned, a little breathless.
It’s both a kind of contemporary international political thriller and a rigorously researched investigation into a piece of the past and the way it is remembered in the present. Or not remembered, when the truth of that past becomes politically problematic.
The film follows two slightly eccentric professors, the Australian Danny Ben-Moshe from the Centre for Citizenship and Globalisation at Deakin University and Dovid Katz who taught Yiddish at Vilnius University, the oldest in Lithuania, as they confront the Lithuanian government.
Posted in Arts, Double Genocide: The New Form of Holocaust Revisionism & Denial, Film, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory
Tagged Centre for Citizenship and Globalization, Danny Ben-Moshe, Holocaust in Lithuania, Rewriting History
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It’s Not Just About the New Tuskulėnai “Peace Park” in Vilnius
O P I N I O N
by Milan Chersonski
Milan Chersonski (Chersonskij), longtime editor (1999-2011) of Jerusalem of Lithuania, quadrilingual (English-Lithuanian-Russian-Yiddish) newspaper of the Jewish Community of Lithuania, was previously (1979-1999) director of the Yiddish Folk Theater of Lithuania, which in Soviet times was the USSR’s only Yiddish amateur theater company. The views he expresses in DefendingHistory are his own. This is an authorized translation from the Russian original.
Photo: Milan Chersonski at this desk at the Jewish Community of Lithuania (image © 2012 Jurgita Kunigiškytė). Milan Chersonski section.
Can you imagine a European Union / NATO government investing millions in setting up a “Peace Park” in its beautiful capital city, in memory of people buried at the site of the park, when hundreds of them were Nazi collaborators who eagerly supported the annihilation of the Jewish population of their country?
Earlier this month, VilNews.com prominently published an article by Vincas Karnila, presented as the Introduction to a series called “The Mass Graves in Tuskulėnai.” It is a panegyric to the employees of the Museum of Genocide in Vilnius and the Center for the Study of Genocide and Resistance for their tireless efforts to establish the Tuskulėnai Peace Park. Readers are informed that six articles will follow. [Update: Subsequent articles in Karnila’s series can be found in www.VilNews.com.]
We know from official sources that Soviet KGB victims were buried at Tuskulėnai from 1944 to 1947.
Karnila tells us:
Posted in "Tuskulėnai Peace Park", Arts, Bold Citizens Speak Out, Collaborators Glorified, Double Genocide: The New Form of Holocaust Revisionism & Denial, Exotic Jewish Tourism, History, Lithuania, Milan Chersonski (1937-2021), Museums, Opinion, Politics of Memory, VilNews.com, Vilnius's Genocide Center and the Genocide Museum it Manages
Tagged Genocide Center of Lithuania, Tuskulenai Peace Park, VilNews.com, Vincas Karnila
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Executive Director of “Red-Brown Commission” Doubts Lithuanian Jews were Killed “on a Racial Basis” Before Arrival of German Forces in 1941
O P I N I O N
A number of viewers of the new Australian documentary film Rewriting History, by Marc Radomsky and Danny Ben-Moshe, have submitted to Defending History near-identical transcripts of a statement on camera, made to the film’s producers, by the executive director of the “International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes in Lithuania.”
Known for short as the “red-brown commission,” the state-sponsored body has long been opposed by Holocaust survivors and educators. The commission is responsible for Holocaust education in Lithuania, but has also taken an active political role in promoting the 2008 Prague Declaration and various details of alleged “equality” of Nazi and Soviet crimes. The commission’s website features the Prague Declaration in both English and Lithuanian.
The commission’s executive director, Ronaldas Račinskas, is quoted as saying on camera that his commission does not support “Double Genocide” but that he does support the 2008 Prague Declaration (though he concedes there are passages to be “discussed”). The problem is that the Prague Declaration is the primary document of the Double Genocide movement in Europe.
See also: Mr. Račinskas’s 2011 speech in the Lithuanian parliament; Critiques of his commission; 2015 Update: His call for investigations of Holocaust survivors who joined up with the anti-Nazi partisans.
Mr. Račinskas goes on to say, according to the transcripts provided of his Rewriting History interview:
Posted in "Red-Brown Commission", Arts, Australia, Double Games, Double Genocide: The New Form of Holocaust Revisionism & Denial, EU, Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky (Fania Brancovskaja): 1922-2024, History, Holocaust Policies of Mr. Ronaldas Račinskas and the State-Sponsored "International Commission" (ICECNSORL), Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Politics of Memory, US State Dept Manipulated?
Tagged Holocaust in Lithuania, International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes, Red-Brown Commission, Ronaldas Racinskas, Yad Vashem
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Explosive Reactions to Saulius Berzhinis’s New Film on the Holocaust in Jurbarkas (Yúrberik)
O P I N I O N / F I L M R E V I E W
by Milan Chersonski
Vilnius film director Saulius Berzhinis
There has recently been extensive Lithuanian media coverage of a conflict between the authorities of the city Jurbarkas, Lithuania, and the film company Filmų Kopa, founded by film director Saulius Berzhinis (Beržinis) and managed by Ona Biveinienė.
To mark the seventieth anniversary of the beginning of World War II in Lithuania and the beginning of the total annihilation of its Jews, the Jurbarkas regional museum commissioned a documentary about Jews who lived in the town before World War II, paid for by the Ministry of Culture and the budget of the municipality. Filmų Kopa was awarded the commission and made a documentary called “When Yiddish was Heard in Jurbarkas.” The town’s name in Yiddish is Yúrberik or Yúrburg.
As the film has become a matter of sharp conflict, it is worthwhile in the first instance to take a good look at the actual product that Filmų Kopa delivered to the residents of Jurbarkas.
Posted in Arts, Bold Citizens Speak Out, Commemorations for Destroyed Communities, Film, It Pays to Defend History: Success Over the Years..., Lithuania, Media Watch, Milan Chersonski (1937-2021), News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, Saulius Beržinis
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Light and Darkness Do Not Mix
O P I N I O N
by Geoff Vasil
Saulius Beržinis is an astounding filmmaker. Somehow the Lithuanian director of documentaries has a knack for drawing out frank admissions on camera, even from collaborators who recount how they murdered Jews.
Beržinis has a great reputation in Holocaust studies around the world, but, as the saying goes, a prophet is often unrecognized in his native land, and the cloak of invisibility around the Lithuanian Holocaust cast by the activists in the Double Genocide industry has marginalized the documentary maker at home, where his “The Happy Faces of the Murderers” is basically unknown.
Posted in Arts, Bold Citizens Speak Out, Film, Geoff Vasil, News & Views, Opinion, Saulius Beržinis
Tagged Holocaust in Lithuania
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A Hidden Monument in Vilnius — Hopelessly Invisible?
In response to several requests from the United States, DefendingHistory.com this week asked three colleagues who found themselves in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, to try to see the “Flame of Hope” monument, by sculptor Leonardo Nierman, in memory of the victims of the Lithuanian Holocaust, located in the heart of the Old Town, in a yard that was in the Vilna Ghetto between September 1941 and the ghetto’s liquidation three years later.
Posted in Arts, Commemorations for Destroyed Communities, Exotic Jewish Tourism, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, Shelly Rybak Pearson
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‘Day and Night’ is an Epoch-Making Play for Modern Lithuania
O P I N I O N / R E V I E W
by Birutė Ušinskaitė
Cover of playbill
It was just another rainy and not overly cold evening in early December of the year 2011, but the play I was privileged to see at the Kaunas Chamber Theatre, Day and Night, proved to me, a proud Vilnius native and resident, that not all that is bold and brilliant originates in our capital.
For the first time in modern Lithuanian history, in my experience at any rate, a Lithuanian play on the Holocaust did not try to deflect attention ― or responsibility ― to the Germans or to some pseudo-objective forces of society, or to stick to some “kosher” theme like the dilemmas of Gens and the Judenrat in the Vilna Ghetto in order to avoid talking about what is frankly the main point for our country: the voluntary participation of many of our countrymen in the mass murder of the Jewish citizens of our own country, in some cases before the Nazis even arrived.
Posted in Arts, Birutė Ušinskaitė, Bold Citizens Speak Out, Events, Film, Legacy of 23 June 1941, Lithuania, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, VilNews.com
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A ‘Documentary Film’ Tries to Establish the Legend of the ‘Uprising of the Enslaved’
O P I N I O N
by Milan Chersonski
Milan Chersonski at the Lithuanian Parliament. From 1979 to 1999 Chersonski directed the Yiddish Amateur Theater in Vilnius, Lithuania. He worked in various capacities at the quadrilingual (English-Lithuanian-Russian-Yiddish) newspaper Jerusalem of Lithuania, publication of The Jewish Community of Lithuania, from its founding in 1989 until the paper was closed in 2011. He was its editor-in-chief from 1999 to 2011. He is now a senior analyst at DefendingHistory.com and contributes to various publications.
On September 28th 2010, the Parliament of Lithuania announced that 2011 would be the Year of Commemoration of Battles for Freedom and Great Losses. This mysterious name of some sort of anniversary appeared exactly a week after the same year, 2011, was declared the Year of Commemorating the Genocide of Lithuanian Jews. The Jewish Community of Lithuania reacted without delay to the ‘dual track’, apartheidized commemorations.
Now which “battles for freedom” are they talking about in the resolution? What sort of great losses? The resolution does not say specifically. Yes, Lithuanians valiantly rebelled for freedom in 1794, and in 1831, as well as in 1863, and then there were serious demonstrations on behalf of freedom in 1904-1905, and then there were the battles from 1918 to 1920 for the independence and borders of the newly founded state.
But it is impossible to understand exactly which events and which dates they now had in mind from the text of Lithuanian parliamentary resolution no. XI-1038 of September 28th 2010. And this is probably no accident, as shown by the subsequent actions of the Lithuanian government and leading organizations here.
Posted in Antisemitism & Bias, Arts, Collaborators Glorified, Events, Film, History, Kazys Škirpa, Legacy of 23 June 1941, Lithuania, Milan Chersonski (1937-2021), News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, Vilnius's Genocide Center and the Genocide Museum it Manages
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Has LRG Media (UK) been Compromised?
The prestigious British-based LRG Media, a multimedia company with an impressive record of achievements and awards, has apparently been targeted by certain elements in Lithuanian government circles as the latest ‘Naive Useful Foreign Entity’ to help make respectable internationally the state-sponsored campaigns for Double Genocide, Holocaust Obfuscation, and selective toleration of current antisemitism.
Posted in "Jewish" Events as Cover?, Arts, Double Genocide: The New Form of Holocaust Revisionism & Denial, Film, Identity Theft of Litvak Heritage, Media Watch, News & Views, Politics of Memory, What Do Fake Litvak Games Look Like?
Tagged David Wachs, Fake Litvak Forum, Litvak Multimedia Project, LRG Media
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