Litvak Affairs

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LITVAK STUDIES

Prof. Girnius Tries Again to Glorify the LAF That in 1941 Killed Thousands of Jewish Neighbors, Unleashing the Lithuanian Holocaust

Posted on 19 March 2025 by Defending History

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) 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 public launch of a new initiative to whitewash the LAF was announced in an article in Delfi.lt this week, announcing 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.

“On 11 March [2025], a group of Conservative Party members set up the June Uprising Collegium with the aim to ‘properly assess and legitimize the uprising as a significant historical event’ which had decisive influence on the subsequent struggle for Lithuanian independence.” — K. Girnius in Delfi.lt

Leonidas Donskis answers from the grave with his essay aptly titled: ‘When will the truth finally set us free’? See also his other essays in Defending History.

Girnius’s new “revisionism launch” takes out of context quotes from two of them, Donskis and Venclova, in a lame effort to recruit them to this pathetic cause. But the tragically prematurely departed Leonidas Donskis (1962-2016) answers him today from the grave. It seems the original Delfi.lt link to Donskis’s 2010 essay was taken down (but a version was published by Bernardinai in 2019). Back in 2010, the prescient and brilliant Lithuanian thinker asked Defending History to arrange and publish an English translation of his essay, which he personally edited and approved. Before that year was out, Defending History also arranged for translation and publication of an essay in the debate by philosopher Nida Vasiliauskaitė.

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Posted in Celebrations of Fascism, Christian-Jewish Issues, Collaborators Glorified, Dovid Katz, History, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Prof. Girnius Tries Again to Glorify the LAF That in 1941 Killed Thousands of Jewish Neighbors, Unleashing the Lithuanian Holocaust

Another Kind of Final Solution?

Posted on 14 March 2025 by Defending History

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.

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Posted in Dalia Epstein (Dalija Epšteinaitė), Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Museums, News & Views, Opinion, Yiddish Affairs | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Another Kind of Final Solution?

Claims Conference Should Think Again Before Inadvertently Legitimizing East European Far-Right Holocaust Revisionism

Posted on 12 March 2025 by Defending History

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.

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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 , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Claims Conference Should Think Again Before Inadvertently Legitimizing East European Far-Right Holocaust Revisionism

Lithuania’s State Jewish Museum Deletes Yiddish from all Three Vilnius Addresses

Posted on 27 February 2025 by Defending History

OPINION | YIDDISH AFFAIRS | LITVAK ISSUES | MUSEUMS

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by Dovid Katz

 

Beloved multilingual signs proudly including Yiddish from Pylimo 4A, Pamenkalnio 12, and Naugarduko 10 are all gone. Their replacements have not a word of Yiddish text. Why this decision just now, in the 2020s, to eliminate Yiddish from state institutions that were so proud to include right-on-the-street Yiddish for close to forty years? Just now, when the government is making such nice hay from the 100th anniversary Yivo celebrations. Is what the Vilna Yivo stood for taken seriously?

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From the days of its majestic late 1980s independence struggle onward, Lithuanian state policy has for forty years now had the literally “one in the world” grace of centering the Yiddish language in the Jewish culture component of its remembrance and city signage policies and vision. The city once known as a symbolic capital of Yiddish language and scholarship would preserve the memory of that heritage with national and municipal pride. Plaques on the former addresses of master scholars Zalmen Reyzen and Max Weinreich, of poets Meyshe Kulbak and Avrom Sutzkever all have prominent Yiddish text. Vilna Ghetto signage has Yiddish. Yiddish is one of the four languages adorning the Tsemakh Shabad sculpture by the late Romas Kvintas.

Above all, the buildings of the city’s Jewish Museum, uniquely in Europe, proudly affixed multilingual signs including Yiddish. See the photo above. Now, they have all been replaced. Sign replacements in general were necessitated by name changes and repurposing of sites (such as the Samuel Bak Museum at the Naugarduko unit — But was Mr. Bak consulted on this heartless and soulless Yiddish elimination?). Evolution and change are natural over decades. But instead of including Yiddish in the new signs (and, as the first sign in the photo clearly shows, Hebrew and Yiddish can cheerfully coexist on the same slab of metal), the language has been ditched without a trace. When asked where the old Yiddish facade plaques could be seen by appointment (some had been there for decades and are a notable historic treasure of the museum’s own history, e.g. the top image in the above collage), some visitors were told that staff have no idea where they are or whether they were just thrown out.

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Posted in Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Museums, News & Views, Yiddish Affairs | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Lithuania’s State Jewish Museum Deletes Yiddish from all Three Vilnius Addresses

Welcoming Lithuanian Prime Minister’s New Working Group on Antisemitism

Posted on 9 February 2025 by Defending History

 OPINION | ANTISEMITISM | LITHUANIA

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OPINION

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Today’s announcement that Lithuanian prime minister Gintautas Paluckas has set up a Working Group to study the rise in antisemitism is welcomed by all people of good faith. He has assembled a group of highly accomplished public figures, led by the PM’s advisor Alexander Radchenko, who will report to the PM by 1 June 2025 on a “plan of action for combating antisemitism, xenophobia, and other forms of incitement to discord; and, on the encouragement of Jewish life”. Among the Working Group’s members are deputy minister of internal affairs Gintaras Aliksandravičius; director of the Department of National Minorities Dainius Babilas; Head of the Culture Department of the Utena District Municipality Jūratė Brasiūnienė; member of the Vilnius City Council Vygintas Gasparavičius; chairperson of the Lithuanian Jewish Community Faina Kukliansky; head of the Cabinet of the Minister of Foreign Affairs Martynas Lukoševičius; deputy minister of Education, Science and Sports Jonas Petkevičius. Congratulations and godspeed to them and their colleagues.

The proximate event — inclusion of an openly antisemitic led party in the national governing coalition — that led to the Working Group’s formation needs no repetitive recital here. For over a decade and a half, Defending History prides itself on covering the ground that others may overlook (rather than repeat what is being done out there). Nevertheless, one generic comment is perhaps apropos: To be a working group, not a PR diversion, the new entity will frankly need to comment on its own convenor’s, the prime minister’s, decision to lead a coalition government that includes an antisemitic party, the first time this has happened in any Baltic country’s post-soviet history. Or is the working group precluded from commenting on a rise in antisemitism precipitated by the prime minister’s indefensible decision that has legitimized bigtime what had been marginal claptrap? That would render it akin to the proverbial case of beating the dickens out of a person, causing huge bodily and mental harm, and then offering for the cyberworld of the  contemporary press release, a little band-aid in a pristine plastic packet.

In the usual constructive spirit of providing timely input in the public space, the Defending History community offers its proverbial two cents in the form of — three points.

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Posted in Antisemitism & Bias, Lithuania, Lithuania's Jewish Community Issues, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Opinion | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Welcoming Lithuanian Prime Minister’s New Working Group on Antisemitism

Saulius Beržinis’s Documentary Film ‘Petrified Time’ on the Holocaust in Sheduva

Posted on 6 February 2025 by Defending History

FILM | ARTS | OPINION | SHEDUVA | SAULIUS BERŽINIS

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FILM REVIEW

by Roland Binet  (De Panne, Belgium)

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The history of Lithuania during the Second World War is complex and tragic. After short-lived continued independence in 1939-1940, following the playing out of the secret clauses of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 23 August 1939, the USSR effectively took over Lithuania in June 1940 and established a harsh regime. Tens of thousands of inhabitants were then deported to Siberia, with big blocks of victims just one week prior to Germany’s June 1941 Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union. The Nazi invaders and high numbers of local collaborators slaughtered 96.4% of the Jewish population of the country, over 200,000 people, one of the highest rates of the genocide of the Jews in Holocaust-era Europe. In 1944, the USSR liberated the country from the Germans, and then went on to occupy it until its renewed independence in 1990. It has since rapidly evolved into a successful EU and NATO state.

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Posted in Antisemitism & Bias, Arts, Film, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Opinion, Roland Binet, Saulius Beržinis, Šeduva (Sheduva, Shádeve, Shádov) and its "Museum of the Lost Shtetl" | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Saulius Beržinis’s Documentary Film ‘Petrified Time’ on the Holocaust in Sheduva

Full Translation of Jan.-Feb. 2025 Email Blast Defaming Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky with Links to Massive Online Defamation

Posted on 4 February 2025 by Defending History

FANIA YOCHELES BRANTSOVSKY | BLAMING THE VICTIMS | ANTISEMITISM | LITHUANIA | LITVAK AFFAIRS

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The following is a full translation of the recent email blast published in Defending History in the original Lithuanian on 31 Jan. For background see the English introduction there, as well as reports and discussion on the DH editor’s Facebook page. For a full chronology of the now nineteen year old campaign against Holocaust survivors who survived by joining the anti-Nazi resistance see DH’s Blaming the Victims page.  Obersvers have noted that the German teacher recruited to launch the campaign of defamation against Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky (Brancovskaja) and Dr. Rokhl (Rachel) Margolis, I. Tumavičiūtė in a January 2008 article in a far-right antisemitic daily (original; English translation) reappears this week as the campaign, apparently including the Genocide Center (GRRLC) and its director, is duly relaunched. Note the text contains the link to the online clip from a Soviet-era documentary where Fania Brantsovsky’s remarks about regrettable civilian casualties during the partisans’ battles against the Nazis in the forests of Lithuania is maliciously taken out of context to imply targeting of civilians and/or her own participation in the battle described. The youtube video clip, that has been up for seven years is entitled “isgama  branvcovskaja” that translates as “The Degenerate Brantsovsky” or “Scum Brantsovsky.” More background of “polite” state support for the defamation of Holocaust Survivors who joined the anti-Nazi resistance includes the public statement for a video documentary by the executive director of the state-sponsored “Red-Brown Commission” (officially “The International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupational Regimes in Lithuania”). The participation of the state-sponsored Genocide Center in this week’s events is apparently meant to give the new campaign an air of legitimacy, during a time of much-heightened antisemitic sentiment.

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https://www.genocid.lt/centras/lt/4535/a/

COMMEMORATION of Kaniūkai Village Residents, Murdered by Soviet Partisans in 1944

February 2, 2025

10:30 AM – Holy Mass at St. Ignatius Church (Vilnius)
11:30 AM – Departure for Kaniūkai village cemetery (Šalčininkai district) after the Holy Mass
2:00 PM – Start of the commemoration event

Participants:

Dr. Arūnas Bubnys, General Director of GRRCL

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Posted in A 21st Century Campaign Against Lithuanian Holocaust Survivors?, Documents, Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky (Fania Brancovskaja): 1922-2024, History, Human Rights, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Museums, News & Views, Politics of Memory | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Full Translation of Jan.-Feb. 2025 Email Blast Defaming Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky with Links to Massive Online Defamation

International Opposition to ‘New’ Proposals for Conference-Memorial Complex, with Seating Capacity for Thousands — in the Middle of the Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery

Posted on 2 February 2025 by Defending History

[last update]

OLD VILNA JEWISH CEMETERY AT PIRAMÓNT | EARLIER OPPOSITION TO CONVENTION CENTER |  2023-2024 “WORKING GROUP” ON VILNA CEMETERY | LIST OF MEMBERS | MOUNTING OPPOSITION TO THE NEW MUSEUM/MEMORIAL PROJECT | CEMETERIES & MASS GRAVES | HUMAN RIGHTS | 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

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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 , , , , , , | Comments Off on International Opposition to ‘New’ Proposals for Conference-Memorial Complex, with Seating Capacity for Thousands — in the Middle of the Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery

Blaming the Victims: Documents and Sources

Posted on 31 January 2025 by Defending History

UPDATED 31 Jan. 2025 (originally published 21 Aug. 2010). See also (older, not updated) Responses page.

2006    2007    2008    2009    2010    2011   2012    2013    2014    2015    2016    2017   2025

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Preface

The campaign of defamation by Lithuanian state prosecutors and allied elites (particularly in the Genocide Center and the antisemitic right-wing press) has resulted in a number of cherished Holocaust Survivors being smeared as “war criminals” without a single charge ever having been leveled against anybody. Launched in 2006, the campaign, abusing tools such as “pre-trial investigations” and leaks to the media, have sought to brand as “war criminals” the heroes of the war against Hitler. It grew in 2011 with the addition of equally perverse  “libel charges,” launched with fanfare when Interpol (!) was sent to disturb in Tel Aviv the elected head of the last active group of Litvak Holocaust survivors in the world. Then, in 2013, the state’s “red-brown commission” defamed one of Vilnius’s last survivors on equally perverse grounds, all the while putting on “Holocaust events” for naive Western audiences, usually funded by the (unknowing) Lithuanian taxpayer, in venues  including London, New York, Toronto, and Vilnius.

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Posted in A 21st Century Campaign Against Lithuanian Holocaust Survivors?, Documents, Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky (Fania Brancovskaja): 1922-2024, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Politics of Memory | Comments Off on Blaming the Victims: Documents and Sources

Far Right Antisemitic Establishment & Genocide Center in Vilnius: Launching New Campaign of Defamation Against Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky (1922-2024)

Posted on 31 January 2025 by Defending History

FANIA YOCHELES BRANTSOVSKY | BLAMING THE VICTIMS | LITHUANIA | LITVAK AFFAIRS

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The following email blast with its links to online sites, forthcoming events in Vilnius, and at its end, a link to an old  and an out-of-context defamatory video extract on youtube, has been widely recirculated this week. It comes on the heels of the state Jewish museum’s ill-conceived event  legitimizing the director of the state-funded Genocide Center, an institution that champions glorification of collaborators, defamation of victims and history revisionism in the far-right spirit of East European ultranationalism. See also the shameful longtime position of the state-sponsored “Red-Brown Commission” and Defending History’s Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky Resource Page; Fania Brantsovsky section; summary of state prosecutors’ campaign of defamation; index of topics and videos posted at the time of her death, at age 102, last September, including a call for a formal state apology to her family and those of fellow Holocaust survivors who became heroes of the free world by escaping the Vilna Ghetto to join up with the anti-Nazi partisans in the forests of Lithuania. Fania’s last wish was for the “Jewish Partisan Fort” outside Vilnius to be restored and preserved for future generations. More on editor’s Facebook page (with discussion in the comments that follow).

[UPDATE OF 4 FEB. 2025: See now full translation of the text below, and further discussion on Dovid Katz’s Facebook page].

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https://www.genocid.lt/centras/lt/4535/a/

Kaniūkų kaimo gyventojų, 1944 m. nužudytų raudonųjų partizanų,
MINĖJIMAS
2025 m. vasario 2 d.

10.30 val. šv. Mišios Šv. Ignoto bažnyčioje (Vilniuje)
11.30 val. po šv. Mišių vykstame į Kaniūkų kaimo kapinaites (Šalčininkų r.)
14.00 val. renginio pradžia
Renginyje dalyvauja:
– LGGRTC gen. direktorius dr. Arūnas Bubnys
– Seimo narys prof. Valdas Rakutis
– Šalčininkų r. atstovas
– Karaliaus Mindaugo šaulių 10-osios rinktinės Vilniaus (1003) kuopos vadas dr. Kostas Ivanauskas
ir kuopos šauliai
– Nacionalinis susivienijimasContinue reading

Posted in A 21st Century Campaign Against Lithuanian Holocaust Survivors?, Antisemitism & Bias, Christian-Jewish Issues, Dr. Arūnas Bubnys and State Holocaust Revisionism in Lithuania, Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky (Fania Brancovskaja): 1922-2024, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Politics of Memory, Vilnius, Vilnius's Genocide Center and the Genocide Museum it Manages | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Far Right Antisemitic Establishment & Genocide Center in Vilnius: Launching New Campaign of Defamation Against Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky (1922-2024)

Will Vilnius State Jewish Museum Reconsider Featuring Head of ‘Holocaust Fixing’ Genocide Center for International Holocaust Remembrance Day?

Posted on 16 January 2025 by Defending History

GENOCIDE CENTER & MUSEUM |  A. BUBNYS | NOREIKA WORSHIP | ŠKIRPA WORSHIP | MUSEUMS

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OPINION

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The Defending History community, which has expressed profound admiration for recent major progress of Lithuania’s state Jewish museum (“Vilna Gaon Museum of Jewish History”), is saddened that the museum has chosen to commemorate this year’s International Holocaust Commemoration Day by a 30 Jan. event featuring revisionist historian Dr. A. Bubnys, director of the “Holocaust fixing” Genocide Center (who proudly and publicly poses with placards of leading Holocaust collaborators J. Noreika and K. Škirpa). Without including in the panel a single Lithuanian champion of truthtelling. Let alone a single Jewish member of the panel. Let alone families of survivors and victims.

To pour salt on the wounds, the announced topic is “Effectiveness of the Book as a Media in the Wars of Historical Memory.” Yes, the author of Genocide Center produced and published books at the vanguard of the new incarnation of Holocaust Denial via obfuscation, distortion, “Double Genocide” revisionism, victim-blaming and perpetrator-worship, is on offer from an EU/NATO member’s “state Jewish museum” as its way of marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day. For shame.

We call on the museum to cancel immediately this ill-conceived stunt, whose prime political purpose is an unadulterated attempt at legitimizing East European glorification of Holocaust collaborators and the ultranationalist rewriting of history via partnerships with ostensibly “Jewish entities.” Same tired old playbook, and it won’t work. There is, moreover, the insult for victims and survivors and the pain hoisted on their families today. This is grave disrespect toward the citizens of Lithuania whose hard earned tax euros support both institutions so generously. As for it all invoking the name of the Gaon of Vilna — he is surely twisting in his grave.

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Posted in Antisemitism & Bias, Christian-Jewish Issues, Events, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Museums, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, State Glorification of Holocaust Collaborator J. Noreika, Vilnius's Genocide Center and the Genocide Museum it Manages | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Will Vilnius State Jewish Museum Reconsider Featuring Head of ‘Holocaust Fixing’ Genocide Center for International Holocaust Remembrance Day?

The Saga of Saulius Beržinis’s Documentary on the Holocaust in Sheduva: In Spite of ‘Ban’, Copies are Circulating Widely

Posted on 8 January 2025 by Defending History

[LATEST UPDATE; ORIGINAL PUBLICATION: 27 APRIL 2023]

OPINION|FILM|BOLD CITIZENS|SAULIUS BERŽINIS|SHEDUVA | MUSEUM OF THE LOST SHTETL

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Partial chronology of recent events in the life and times of modern Lithuania’s first major Holocaust truth teller, documentary film maker

Saulius Beržinis

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JUMP TO ORIGINAL ARTICLE

TO UPDATES; LATEST UPDATE

FOREIGN JOURNALIST’S ARTICLE WITHDRAWN FROM PUBLICATION

DEFENDING HISTORY’S BERŽINIS SECTION

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What is it all about?

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Posted in Bold Citizens Speak Out, Film, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Museums, News & Views, Opinion, Saulius Beržinis, Šeduva (Sheduva, Shádeve, Shádov) and its "Museum of the Lost Shtetl" | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Saga of Saulius Beržinis’s Documentary on the Holocaust in Sheduva: In Spite of ‘Ban’, Copies are Circulating Widely

Antisemitism, Holocaust Revisionism, and Anti-Israelism in Modern Lithuania

Posted on 26 November 2024 by Defending History

OPINION  |  ANTISEMITISM  |  HOLOCAUST REVISIONISM  |  LITHUANIAN JEWISH LIFE 

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by Arkady Kurliandchik

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Reflecting on the current situation in Lithuania, where open antisemites do not hesitate to reveal themselves as such, I am trying to understand the origins of such behavior.

According to some historians, approximately 20,000 people in Lithuania actively participated in the extermination of Jews during World War II. And those who did not personally engage in the killings but considered such extermination to be just and commendable numbered in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions.

Antisemitic propaganda did not originate in Germany, but before the war, it became particularly sophisticated there. Jews were portrayed as insects that needed to be exterminated. And then this initiative was adopted and further developed in Lithuania.

Viewpoint of a Jewish citizen in today’s Vilnius

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Posted in Antisemitism & Bias, Arkady Kurliandchik, Double Genocide: The New Form of Holocaust Revisionism & Denial, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Antisemitism, Holocaust Revisionism, and Anti-Israelism in Modern Lithuania

Rabbi Elchonon Baron calls on Lithuania’s President & Presumptive PM Not to Enable New Coalition Government that Includes Openly Antisemitic Party

Posted on 8 November 2024 by Defending History

OPINION | ANTISEMITISM | LITHUANIA | RABBI BARON SECTION

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SEE UPDATES ON FRONT PAGE
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by Rabbi Elchonon Baron

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Honorable Gitanas Nausėda, President of the Republic of Lithuania

Below is a letter I sent to Mr. Gintauatas Paluckas this morning from Vilnius. We stand tonight on the 86th anniversary of Kristallnacht in a country, Lithuania, that witnessed the annihilation of 96.4% of its Jewry just eight decades ago. In the name of civilization and a free and modern Europe, unshackled by ancient endemic antisemitism and all the allied ills that come with it, I implore you not to allow the formation of a government that includes the openly antisemitic “The Dawn of the Nemunas” party. It is a slippery and dangerous path for any European country to take, and greatly risks arousing the centuries-old European demon of antisemitism in Lithuania and beyond. It will not be understood by anyone in the world any differently.

 

Has Europe Forgotten So Soon?

Open Letter to Presumptive Lithuanian Prime Minister Gintautas Paluckas:

I am writing from Vilna just as a bona fide European Pogrom on Israeli soccer fans plays out in Amsterdam, and a day before the 86th anniversary of Kristallnacht. Just over twelve hours ago I heard the shocking news that you and your Social Democrat party have invited “The Dawn of the Nemunas” headed by the avowed court-confirmed antisemite Remigijus Žemaitaitis (who has claimed that the Jews have killed the Lithuanians—not the reverse) to join your coalition to govern Lithuania, and I was too distressed to respond immediately.

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Posted in Antisemitism & Bias, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Opinion, Rabbi Elchonon Baron | Comments Off on Rabbi Elchonon Baron calls on Lithuania’s President & Presumptive PM Not to Enable New Coalition Government that Includes Openly Antisemitic Party

Vilnius “Jews-for-Jesus” Conference to Feature Verbickienė and Toleikis

Posted on 24 September 2024 by Defending History

OPINION | LITVAK AFFAIRS | ANTISEMITISM | VILNIUS | CHRISTIAN-JEWISH RELATIONS

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by Dovid Katz

VILNIUS—For centuries, missionaries have cunningly preyed on small, weak, fractured and vulnerable Jewish communities, cleverly roping in widely known and respected figures to lend a veneer of academic or intellectual legitimacy. At issue is whether the majority Christian culture is prepared to accept as equals a minority whose theology differs, without campaigns to “recruit souls” which implies the worst about the faith and people whose souls need to be “saved.” Indeed, the necessary conclusion about the inherent evil (in the case at hand historically including the charge of deicide) of the unconverted played its role in the mindset that was among the conceptual prerequisites for the Holocaust. Around 96% of Lithuania’s Jewish citizens were massacred. Some local priests risked everything to hide and rescue a Jewish neighbor. Others gave pep talks to the local shooters ensuring them that they were firing at the Devil himself. The issue is one that calls for humility, intercultural respect, and human sensitivity.

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Posted in "Jewish" Events as Cover?, Antisemitism & Bias, Christian-Jewish Issues, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Opinion, Vilnius | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Vilnius “Jews-for-Jesus” Conference to Feature Verbickienė and Toleikis

Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky (Brancovskaja): 1922-2024

Posted on 22 September 2024 by Defending History

FANIA YOCHELES BRANTSOVSKY | OBITUARIES | LITVAK AFFAIRS | JEWISH PARTISAN HEROES DEFAMED BY VILNIUS PROSECUTORS

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Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky: “My last wish is that the Jewish Partisan Fort, where we lived, and where we fought the Nazis in the forests of Lithuania, be preserved and restored so future generations will know of our resistance against genocide, and so we honor all those who fell fighting for the freedom of all of us.”

Compilation of articles, documentaries, videos, and photos. Plus: Saga of 2008. Call to preserve “Fania’s fort in the forest” for future generations.

See Defending History’s Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky Section: how Vilna’s most beloved Yiddish icon was pursued by authorities hell bent on revising Holocaust history.

Update: See now the Following Fania project

Fania’s family, heirs and students deserve a formal state apology for the shameful campaign of prosecution and defamation (chronology) against her and the other Jewish partisan veterans, all in the spirit of “Double Genocide” Holocaust revisionism (video sample). Follow the history to see also the inspirational leading role in Vilnius of then Irish ambassador to Lithuania Dónal Denham; also Austria’s Andrea Wicke, Norway’s Steinar Gil, UK’s  Simon Butt, USA’s John A. Cloud. All in support of Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky and Dr. Rachel Margolis (1921-2015). The historical juxtaposition of the campaign against Jewish partisans and Holocaust revisionism is perhaps best symbolized by the occurrence on single date — 3 June 2008 — of Ambassador Dónal Denham’s reception honoring Ms. Brantsovsky in Vilnius and the proclaiming of the Prague Declaration in Vilnius. Historian and former Yad Vashem chairman Yitzhak Arad, himself a defamed partisan, would go on to research Lithuanian officials’ role in the Prague Declaration.

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Posted in A 21st Century Campaign Against Lithuanian Holocaust Survivors?, Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky (Fania Brancovskaja): 1922-2024, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Obituaries | Comments Off on Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky (Brancovskaja): 1922-2024

Arkady Kurliandchik’s Heroic Stand at the Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery

Posted on 25 August 2024 by Defending History

OPINION | VILNIUS JEWISH COMMUNITY ISSUES | OLD VILNA JEWISH CEMETERY | ARKADY KURLIANDCHIK

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VILNIUS—Last Thursday, 22 August, Defending History distributed the link to an ultranationalist announcement of a demonstration scheduled for the following day at the Old Vina Jewish Cemetery. The demonstration would be against not, directly speaking, the preservation of the Jewish cemetery (though that is the upshot), but against the recent “compromise” that would effectively in any event destroy the cemetery forever: keeping the hated Soviet monstrosity and turning it into a memorial center with exhibits 75% Jewish and 25% Lithuanian. As pointed out by Defending History, this is in any case a (disguised) new events center with seating for thousands who would clap, cheer and flush lavatories surrounded by thousands of extant graves.

Far-right demonstrators stand atop thousands of extant Jewish graves at the Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery. To prevent preservation and restoration of the old  cemetery they seem to have just decided that a hated Soviet building is in fact a symbol of Lithuanian independence (!). Defending History photo by William Adan Pahl.

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Posted in Arkady Kurliandchik, 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 | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Arkady Kurliandchik’s Heroic Stand at the Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery

Kaunesia: Travelling the Dark Memory Lanes of Kaunas

Posted on 18 August 2024 by Defending History

 

OPINION | KAUNAS | MUSEUMS | ANTISEMITISM

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by Adam J. Sacks

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It says something that the only “Devil Museum” in the world is to be found in Kaunas, Lithuania. This city sometimes also known as Kovno, is the most Lithuanian of cities, the capital of independent Lithuania in the interwar years, and still today, the more fully Lithuanian when contrasted to the more multicultural current capital of Vilnius. The Russian, Polish, and English languages, for instance, which are fairly common in Vilnius, are nary to be heard in Kaunas. This “Devil’s Museum” is a global and learned collection of 3000 figurines from 70 countries made by a prominent Lithuanian professor and is certainly a landmark and a must-see. The devil is the most dominant figure in Lithuanian folklore. This figure apparently has a thousand names in the ancient Sanskrit-related Lithuanian language, with over 400 places names and 5000 legends featuring this character. While surveying the collection, so many features of these legends pop out: the devil is rich, often a thief, one who pours coins, who controls the vodka trade, imparts powers of virtuosity on the violin, and who even, at times, cooks humans.

In the accompanying notes, one learns that the devil is often depicted as a nobleman, sometimes even as a German. Yet nowhere in the entire museum however is even the word Jew, or Jewish, even mentioned. Needless to say, the physiognomy in the overwhelming majority of the figurines closely matches the hallmarks and the stereotype of the antisemitic rendering of “the Jew.” The characteristic markings could not be more clear: facial features such as the long or hooked nose, thick lips, flaring nostrils, the strangely squat or wiry physique, beady eyes and the deep eyebrow ridges. This figure is also well known, inter alia, from the centuries of representations of Jews per se featured during Lithuania’s end-of-winter, Mardi Gras-like Užgavėnės festival.

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Posted in Antisemitism & Bias, Christian-Jewish Issues, Collaborators Glorified, Kaunas, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Museums, News & Views, Opinion, Užgavėnės, UŽGAVĖNĖS (SHROVETIDE) | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Kaunesia: Travelling the Dark Memory Lanes of Kaunas

English Translation of Lithuania’s TV Evening News Coverage of Recent Demonstration to Rescue the Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery

Posted on 11 August 2024 by Defending History

 OLD VILNA JEWISH CEMETERY AT PIRAMÓNT | EARLIER OPPOSITION TO CONVENTION CENTER |  2023-2024 “WORKING GROUP” ON VILNA CEMETERY | LIST OF MEMBERS | MOUNTING OPPOSITION TO THE NEW MUSEUM/MEMORIAL PROJECT | CEMETERIES & MASS GRAVES | HUMAN RIGHTS | CHRISTIAN-JEWISH RELATIONS

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VILNIUS—The following is a full translation of the July 25th Lithuanian television evening news segment, on its flagship Panorama program, of that day’s demonstration led by the Vilnius Jewish Community against plans to permanently erase the Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery by refurbishing (instead of demolishing) a hated Soviet eyesore. Demolition would make way for the respectful restoration of the most important Jewish cemetery in the Lithuanian lands of Northeastern Europe.

JUMP TO TRANSLATION. TO SCREENSHOTS.

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Posted in 2023-2024 'Working Group' on the Future of the Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery, Christian-Jewish Issues, Defense of Old Jewish Cemeteries and Mass Grave Sites, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery at Piramónt (in Šnipiškės / Shnípishok), Vilnius | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on English Translation of Lithuania’s TV Evening News Coverage of Recent Demonstration to Rescue the Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery

Welcome to Participants in This Year’s Revived Vilnius Summer Program!

Posted on 4 August 2024 by Defending History

[LAST UPDATE: 9 AUG. 2024]

OPINION | YIDDISH | GREEN HOUSE | LAST JEWISH PARTISAN FORT

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Those of the founders of the Vilnius Summer Program in Yiddish, twenty-six years ago, in July 1998, who are still around and active will today wish to extend the heartiest of welcomes and the best of wishes and godspeed to all the participants of this summer’s mini-revival (two weeks rather than four, no university credit options, but with every perspective of equaling and surpassing the original conception in the years ahead). The new course has issued its program of studies (see the 1998 program for some perspective). The instructors are the well known Yiddish teachers Alec Eliezer Burko, Dov-Ber Boris Kerler, Yuri Vedenyapin, and Anna Verschik (Dr. Burko is a native of the United States, the others of the former USSR). All were at one time or another students of the original course’s founder, underlying the venerable Vilna tradition of chains of learning over the years. In the case of revived Yiddish studies in Vilnius, an early catalyst was the Oxford-Vilnius agreement of 1991 that enabled Lithuanian students to study Yiddish and Judaic studies at Oxford University from 1991 onwards.

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Posted in Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Yiddish Affairs | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Welcome to Participants in This Year’s Revived Vilnius Summer Program!