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Authorities Cover Up Desecration of Lithuania’s Largest Holocaust Mass-Murder Site
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Defense of Old Jewish Cemeteries and Mass Grave Sites
Ponár Desecrated: Authorities Try to Cover Up the Event; No Arrests, No Reaction from Officials
Posted in Defense of Old Jewish Cemeteries and Mass Grave Sites, Human Rights, Lithuania, News & Views, Politics of Memory, Ponár (Ponary, Paneriai)
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Authorities Cover Up Desecration of Lithuania’s Largest Holocaust Mass-Murder Site
Over the weekend, foreign visitors discovered offensive desecrations at Ponár (Paneriai), the mass murder site of 100,000 people during the Holocaust, among them 70,000 Jews of the Vilna region.
One major monument was spray painted with a swastika and the Russian for ‘Hitler was right’, all in red. It was signed ‘Solomon’, the pseudonym of a ubiquitous graffiti artist who had not been known previously for antisemitic attempts, leading to suspicion that use of the name could be a decoy. It was likewise widely thought that the use of Russian rather than Lithuanian was a decoy, as well as a likely slight directed at the country’s tiny Jewish community, which antisemitic attacks frequently accuse of disloyalty.
- ‘Hitler was right’ (in Russian)
Posted in Antisemitism & Bias, Defense of Old Jewish Cemeteries and Mass Grave Sites, Human Rights, News & Views, Politics of Memory
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Eyewitness Report: ‘March of the Living’ at Ponar Killing Site near the Lithuanian Capital
E Y E W I T N E S S R E P O R T / O P I N I O N
by Geoff Vasil
I attended the March of the Living today at Ponár (Polish Ponary, Lithuanian Paneriai), the mass killing site outside Vilnius, Lithuania. It is Yom Hashoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day. I had been to Ponár only once before, because a friend of mine was afraid she would get lost taking the city buses there and back.
Posted in Defense of Old Jewish Cemeteries and Mass Grave Sites, Double Games, Geoff Vasil, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, Ponár (Ponary, Paneriai)
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Revolving Posters at Ponár
Ponár (Polish Ponary, Lithuanian Paneriai) is the mass murder site outside Vilnius where around a hundred thousand civilians were murdered by the Nazi regime. Some 70,000 of them were the Jews of Vilna and its region.
Posted in "Jewish" Events as Cover?, Commemorations for Destroyed Communities, Defense of Old Jewish Cemeteries and Mass Grave Sites, Double Games, News & Views, Politics of Memory, Ponár (Ponary, Paneriai)
Tagged Double Games in Holocaust Politics, Lithuania, Paneriai, Ponar, Ponary)
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Sparse Turnout at Ninth Fort Holocaust Commemoration; Christian Leader Stirs the Assembled
According to historians, the largest slaughter of people in a single day in the history of the Baltic states occurred on the 29th of October 1941, when between nine and ten thousand Jews were gruesomely killed at the ‘Ninth Fort’ near Kaunas (Kovno), Lithuania, under Nazi German command. Highly motivated local forces carried out most of the killing and the associated humiliation and degradation of the victims. To mark the occasion there is a commemoration ceremony at the site held each year at midday on the last Sunday in October. This year it was held today, under a bright sun that warmed the clear chill of late fall in Lithuania.
Organized by the Jewish Community of Kaunas, and addressed by its leader, Gercas (Hershl) Žakas, this year’s event drew just over a hundred people, filling less than half the paved plaza near the memorial dais. Survivors present expressed concern for the future status of Ninth Fort remembrance here, and Holocaust commemoration more generally. The concern echoes various factors, including the gradual disappearance of survivors and witnesses, the shrinking of the vestigial Jewish community, and the shifting political trends.
Posted in Ambassador Steinar Gil, Christian-Jewish Issues, Commemorations for Destroyed Communities, Defense of Old Jewish Cemeteries and Mass Grave Sites, Events, Michael & Fausta Maass, News & Views, Norway, Politics of Memory, Use and Abuse of Sugihara
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Gathering in the Forest to Remember the 8000 Jews of the Svintsyan Region
Some eighty people gathered at midday today, in an eerie mix of wind and autumn sun, at the forest mass grave memorial site just outside the town once known in Yiddish as Svintsyánke (or Nay-Svintsyán; now Lithuania’s 
Švenčioneliai, interwar Poland’s Nowo-Święciany). Such is the custom every year on the first Sunday in October, to remember the eight thousand Jewish civilians murdered there after a gruesome ten days of imprisonment, deprivation of basic human needs, and torture, in makeshift barracks here at the site, in October 1941. The eight thousand Jews were marched (with the lame and the old transported on wagons) from their hometowns in the area to the site on September 27th. They were all shot over a two-day period on the 7th and 8th of October 1941.
Posted in Commemorations for Destroyed Communities, Defense of Old Jewish Cemeteries and Mass Grave Sites, Events, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Poland, Svintsyán (Švenčionys)
Tagged Holocaust in Svencionys, Svintsyan, Svintsyánke
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