Litvak Affairs

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LITVAK STUDIES

Jewish Heritage in Lita (JHL) Issues Statement of Support for Vilnius Jewish Community’s Boycott of Sham Community Elections that Disenfranchise Living Jewish People of Lithuania

Posted on 6 June 2025 by Defending History

OPINION | LITHUANIAN JEWISH COMMUNITY ISSUES | LITVAK AFFAIRS | GOOD WILL FOUNDATION | STOLEN ELECTION SAGA | AJC MISADVENTURES IN LITHUANIA

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OPINION

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VILNIUS—The following is a condensed version of the statement issued today by Jewish Heritage Lita (JHL), signed by its president, Rabbi Elchonon Baron. The full statement appears on the JHL website. It is in support of the Vilnius Jewish Community’s statement (also on Facebook) issued on 5 June 2025. See also Defending History’s reaction.

We at Jewish Heritage in Lita concur with the just position of the Vilna Jewish Community, rejecting the fake elections at the LZB [official state-sponsored ‘Jewish (Litvak) Community of Lithuania’ — ed.]. As the largest, most democratic and authentic Jewish organization in Lithuania, the VJC accurately represents the true voice of the vast majority of Lithuanian Jewry.

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Posted in A Stolen Election and a Small Jewish Community's Protest, Lithuania, Lithuania: Textbook Case of East European Restitution (for Lost Jewish Assets) Abused to Dismantle a Vibrant Jewish Community, Lithuania's Jewish Community Issues, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Opinion, Rabbi Elchonon Baron | Comments Off on Jewish Heritage in Lita (JHL) Issues Statement of Support for Vilnius Jewish Community’s Boycott of Sham Community Elections that Disenfranchise Living Jewish People of Lithuania

Bravo to VILNIUS Jewish Community for Standing Up for Democracy, Justice and Continuity of Lithuania’s Jewish Peoplehood

Posted on 5 June 2025 by Defending History

OPINION | LITHUANIAN JEWISH COMMUNITY ISSUES | LITVAK AFFAIRS | GOOD WILL FOUNDATION | STOLEN ELECTION SAGA | AJC MISADVENTURES IN LITHUANIA

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OPINION

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VILNIUS—The following is an edited and updated version of Dovid Katz’s post on Facebook today in reaction to the  statement posted today by the Vilnius Jewish Community (VJC) on its website and on Facebook.

[Updates: See also the media report in Alfa.lt; the statement posted by Jewish Heritage Lita (JHL) on its website; Defending History’s newly compiled section, Lithuania: a Textbook Case of East European Restitution for Lost Jewish Assets Abused to Dismantle and Diminish a Vibrant Jewish Community, which includes contributions over the years by Ruta Bloshtein, Alexander Chernov, Pinchos Fridberg, Simon Gurevich, Leon Kaplan, Arkady Kurliandchik, Zecharya Olickij, Josif Parasonis, the late Jacob Pilansky, among others.]

BRAVO to our democratic Vilnius Jewish Community (which represents over 1,600 Jewish people in Vilnius, constituting the majority of today’s small Jewish community in Lithuania) for proudly standing up and speaking out on this week’s monkey elections at the corrupt “Lithuanian Jewish Community” (which is state-sponsored, via “restitution” no less, deriving from the property values of the annihilated prewar religious institutions). Their statement is on Facebook and their website.

In the middle of the 2017 election campaign, when a certain conflict-of-interest passport lawyer saw that her opponent was winning, the rules were changed mid-campaign to disenfranchise the living Jewish people of Lithuania and replace them with kangaroo “associations” comprising entities themselves receiving monies and/or other benefits from the same restitution.

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Posted in "Good Will Foundation" (Jewish Restitution in Lithuania), A Stolen Election and a Small Jewish Community's Protest, Dovid Katz, Lithuania, Lithuania: Textbook Case of East European Restitution (for Lost Jewish Assets) Abused to Dismantle a Vibrant Jewish Community, Lithuania's Jewish Community Issues, Litvak Affairs, News & Views | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Bravo to VILNIUS Jewish Community for Standing Up for Democracy, Justice and Continuity of Lithuania’s Jewish Peoplehood

Chris Heath’s ‘No Road Leading Back’ on Ponar and on How we Remember the Holocaust

Posted on 31 May 2025 by Defending History

BOOKS | PONAR | LITHUANIA

 

BOOK REVIEW

by Roland Binet  (De Panne, Belgium)

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Chris Heath, No Road Leading Back: An Improbable Escape from the Nazis and the Tangled Way We Tell the Story of the Holocaust, Schocken Books, 2024.

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In 2016, Chris Heath read an item in the New York Times about a tunnel that had been discovered “at a Holocaust killing site”. It was referring to  Ponar near Vilna (Yiddish Ponár, Polish Ponary, today’s Paneriai outside Vilnius, capital city of Lithuania). It is around ten kilometers (six miles) southwest of Vilnius city center. This caught his attention and he decided to write a book about this heroic feat. The main title is borrowed from two lines that Shmerke Kaczerginski had written in his poem “Shtiler, Shtiler” (Quieter, quieter) that was put to music and sung in the Vilna Ghetto.

Ponar: 100,000 persons killed by bullets from summer 1941 to spring of 1944, about 70% of them Jews including women, children, and the elderly. 

Ponar: List of twelve escapees from Ponar who survived (April 1944): Josef Bielic, Abraham Blazer, Yitzhak Dogin, Yuli Farber, Shlomo Gol, David Kantorovich, Zalman Matzkin, Lejzer Owsiejczyk, Konstantin Potanin, Motke Zeidel, Adam Zinger, Peter Zinin

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Posted in Books, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Opinion, Poland, Politics of Memory, Ponár (Ponary, Paneriai), Roland Binet | Comments Off on Chris Heath’s ‘No Road Leading Back’ on Ponar and on How we Remember the Holocaust

Rašella Galinienė, Head of the Jewish Community of Shavl (Šiauliai, Lithuania) Protests an Inappropriate Memorial Plonked on a Holocaust Mass Grave

Posted on 30 May 2025 by Defending History

OPINION | CEMETERIES | COMMUNITY COMMEMORATION | LITHUANIA | LITVAK AFFAIRS | HUMAN RIGHTS
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Rašella Galinienė, elected head of the Jewish Community of Shavl (Šiauliai) speaks out to protest insensitive desecration of a Holocaust mass grave site where Jews of Yánishok (Joniškis) were massacred. Photo: Shavl Jewish Community.

Rašella Galinienė, elected head of the Jewish Community of Shavl (Šiauliai, northern Lithuania) has led a public call for removal of a series of sculptures erected by a nearby local government authority directly atop the actual graves, in the forest, of hundreds of murdered Jews of the shtetl Yánishok (or Yáneshik, today’s Joniškis). The issue has been reported on prominently in Lithuanian media, including on LRT TV, and the LRT news portal (where mechanical translation to English captures nearly all the text accurately). The media reports dwell on issues of permits, permissions, consultations and the difference of opinion between the Shavl community and the local authorities in the district where the forest mass grave is situated. They report accurately, that the late and long standing beloved leader of the Shavl community, Sania Kerbl (Kerbelis, 1963–2024) expressed — in concord with Jewish tradition and law of thousands of years standing — his staunch opposition to anything being constructed or erected on cemeteries and burial sites.

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Posted in Commemorations for Destroyed Communities, Human Rights, Lithuania, Lithuania's Jewish Community Issues, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Opinion | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Rašella Galinienė, Head of the Jewish Community of Shavl (Šiauliai, Lithuania) Protests an Inappropriate Memorial Plonked on a Holocaust Mass Grave

Is Germany’s New Brigade in Lithuania (‘Panzerbrigade 45’) Situated Right Next to the Rapidly Disappearing Last Anti-Nazi Jewish Partisan Fort in Europe?

Posted on 26 May 2025 by Defending History

LAST JEWISH PARTISAN FORT IN EASTERN EUROPE | POLITICS OF MEMORY | GERMANY | FANIA YOCHELES BRANTSOVSKY | LITVAK AFFAIRS

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OPINION

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VILNIUS—International media has reported in detail on last Thursday’s military ceremonies in Vilnius celebrating the permanent installation of thousands of German soldiers as part of NATO forces in Lithuania, southernmost of the three Baltic republics. The new entity is “Germany’s 45th Armoured Brigade” (Panzerbrigade 45) that is also known as the “Lithuania Brigade”.

The Defending History community is a staunch supporter of the values and security needs of the European Union, NATO, the Western alliance of free and democratic nations, and has from day one condemned the medieval, barbaric February 2022 invasion and unleashing of mass death and destruction upon Ukraine by Putin’s Russian Federation forces. Our support includes reproducing a statement that has appeared for over a decade on p. 1 of DefendingHistory.com (right hand column). As stated there, adherence to the democratic values of the EU and the NATO alliance includes cherishing the free-speech right to criticize: efforts to rewrite Holocaust history by Eastern Europe’s ultranationalist far right; efforts to defame the victims, including Jewish partisans who fought valiantly against the Nazis; efforts to disseminate Double Genocide revisionism in the realm of Holocaust and World War II history; efforts to glorify Holocaust collaborators and perpetrators; efforts to curtail free speech by criminalizing or delegitimizing views that oppose these efforts.

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Posted in A 21st Century Campaign Against Lithuanian Holocaust Survivors?, Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky (Fania Brancovskaja): 1922-2024, Germany, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Is Germany’s New Brigade in Lithuania (‘Panzerbrigade 45’) Situated Right Next to the Rapidly Disappearing Last Anti-Nazi Jewish Partisan Fort in Europe?

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 22 May 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

Rabbi Baron Issues Appeal to Mayor of Vilnius for “full restoration” of the Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery

Posted on 21 May 2025 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 public letter to the mayor of Vilnius from Rabbi Elchonon Baron appeared today on the website of Jewish Heritage in Lita (JHL):

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Honorable Valdas Benkunskas

Mayor of Vilnius

While the municipality’s initiative to mark the borders of the Šnipiškės cemetery, in the Jewish world also known as Piramont cemetery, is a positive step, it’s concerning that a significant portion of the cemetery will fall outside these newly defined boundaries.

Furthermore, the official statement by the Vilnius city municipality, dated May 9, 2025, stating that “…in the 19th century the cemetery was officially closed and most of the remains were reburied,” is inaccurate and confusing. To clarify the historical details:

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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, Human Rights, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery at Piramónt (in Šnipiškės / Shnípishok), Opinion, Rabbi Elchonon Baron, Vilnius | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Rabbi Baron Issues Appeal to Mayor of Vilnius for “full restoration” of the Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery

Vilnius’s Resident Rabbi for Last 30 Years is Called ‘Mr. Krinsky’ in Latest Hate Piece from State-Restitution-fueled ‘Official’ Jewish Community

Posted on 21 April 2025 by Defending History

[2 May 2025 update at end of post]

OPINION | DOCUMENTS | LITHUANIAN JEWISH COMMUNITY AFFAIRS | A STOLEN ELECTION | CHABAD IN VILNIUS | HUMAN RIGHTS

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OPINION

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VILNIUS—Even people who “thought they had seen everything” were taken aback a week ago, when without prior warning Vilnius’s only functioning synagogue was closed down on the occasion of the first seyder night of Passover, one of the most sacred Jewish calendar days of the year. The “explanation” did come shortly thereafter in the form of an official 13 April 2025 statement on the official website of the restitution fueled “Jewish (Litvak) Community of Lithuania” (the “LJC” as is it is still known from the long time title “Lithuanian Jewish Community”, LZB in Lithuanian). That is the “community” that disenfranchised virtually all the remaining few thousand Jewish people in Lithuania, by changing the system of voting (in the middle of an election campaign season!) from choice by community members to that of “associations” mostly benefiting from restitution funds. This transpired during the allegedly rigged 2017 community elections. See also the contemporary JTA reports (here and here). The official community has received tens of millions of dollars from the government in restitution.

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Posted in "Good Will Foundation" (Jewish Restitution in Lithuania), Chabad in Vilnius, Documents, Human Rights, Lithuania, Lithuania's Jewish Community Issues, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Opinion | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Vilnius’s Resident Rabbi for Last 30 Years is Called ‘Mr. Krinsky’ in Latest Hate Piece from State-Restitution-fueled ‘Official’ Jewish Community

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, “white armbanders”) 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 gushing public announcement of the new initiative to whitewash the LAF was announced in an article in Delfi.lt this week, heralding 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.

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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.

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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

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