Museums

More Fake News, Again from Ukraine and Once More — About the Holocaust

Posted on 11 January 2018 by Defending History

UKRAINE | US | MEDIA WATCH

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While much is said in some American media outlets about “fake news” in the US, the smallness of the matters being discussed might come into focus when compared with Ukraine, which is of late producing rather much fake news about the Holocaust and elementary points in World War II history.

As we reported back in October, Ukrainian media outlet Radio Svoboda — the Ukrainian arm of the US Government-funded arm of RFERL — posted a picture from the US Holocaust Museum. It is an image of Polish Jews being deported to a death camp. There was just one problem. Radio Svoboda claimed the picture was from 1949 of Ukrainians being deported to Siberia. In fact, so effective was Radio Svoboda’s forgery that President Poroshenko himself tweeted it claiming it showed Ukrainians being deported. To Poroshenko’s credit, his office took it down almost immediately after we pointed this out.

Posted in Double Genocide, History, Media Watch, Museums, News & Views, Politics of Memory, Ukraine | Comments Off

Lithuania’s Museum of Holocaust Denial

Posted on 12 April 2018 by Defending History

Museums | Genocide Museum | Genocide Center | Double Genocide | Collaborators Glorified | Lithuania

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by Dovid Katz

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In today’s Tablet magazine…

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This past winter here in Vilnius, the charming capital of Lithuania, was much like any other. During long solid weeks of subzero temperatures, as the flow of tourists and roots-seekers slowed to a trickle, I adjusted the route of my daily walk to pass by up to a dozen top tourist sights. Day after day, there was one constant: The most popular, winter-defying “must-visit” for foreigners is “The Museum of Genocide Victims.” Perhaps there is something grotesquely sexy about “genocide.” Maybe the promise of (real) former KGB interrogation rooms and isolation chambers in the basement is less run-of-the-mill and more strikingly authentic than much usual museum fare. Estimates obtained from the museum’s administrators suggest about a million visitors total to date.

Museum of The Lost Truth: A Lithuanian Drama

Posted on 5 October 2018 by Defending History

OPINION | MUSEUMS | SHEDUVA | POLITICS OF MEMORY | SHTETL COMMEMORATIONS | HUMOR (OF SORTS)

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by Evaldas Balčiūnas

Evaldas Balčiūnas informed the English speaking world of a series of state honors for alleged Holocaust collaborators, starting with Jonas Noreika back in 2012. He paid a hefty personal price for it (scroll down his DH section to 2014).

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PREAMBLE

The Lost Shtetl is a massive, holistic project to reclaim the Lithuanian Jewish heritage of Šeduva (Shádeve, older Shádev). Plans include a multimillion euro state-of-the-art museum complex scheduled to open in 2020 that is slated to become an international tourist attraction. Now is an excellent time for public comment and observers’ contemplation.

“The Lost Shtetl” will not be a generic community of faceless Litvaks. It will make tangible the lives of real individuals. But will we learn about the real individuals from the town and its region who destroyed them? Their names and faces? Or will we simply tuck them away into the phrase: “The Nazis and their local collaborators murdered 664 Šeduva Jews in Liaudiškiai forest”?

Posted in Commemorations for Destroyed Communities, Evaldas Balčiūnas, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Museums, News & Views, Politics of Memory, Šeduva (Sheduva, Shádeve, Shádov) and its Free-of-Jewish-Staff "Museum of the Lost Shtetl", South Africa | Tagged Evaldas Balciunas, Holocaust in Lithuania, Lost Shtetl Museum, Museum of Jewish Sheduva, Seduva (Lithunia), Šeduva Museum of Jewish History, Sergejus Kanovicius | Comments Off

Is Yiddish ‘Lingua non grata’ at National Library’s Exhibition on Prewar Lithuanian Jewish Life?

Posted on 5 December 2018 by Defending History

OPINION | MUSEUMS & EXHIBITIONS | THE ARTS | LITVAK AFFAIRS | YIDDISH AFFAIRS

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by Dovid Katz

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Lead banner for National Library’s exhibition on prewar Lithuanian Jewish culture

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For many centuries, the Jews of Vilna (Yiddish Vílne, formal Ashkenazic Hebrew Vílno, modern Hebrew Vílna), and indeed, those from a huge radius of towns and villages in all four directions that looked to the then “Jerusalem of Lithuania” as their spiritual capital, the streets of the oldest Jewish settlement in the town were lovingly known as Di yidishe gas. The narrow dictionary definition is indeed “the Jewish street” but in the Yiddish of Vilna, as in other cities with highly developed Yiddish culture, the phrase came to signify the entire neighborhood in the sense that could perhaps best be captured by something like “our Jewish part of town.” When in 1920, the then Polish authorities offered the Jewish community the opportunity to name a few streets in town, Yídishe gas (Polish Żydowska) became one of them, for the neighborhood’s primary street. When the democratic Lithuanian independence movement of the late 1980s reached the stage of ridding the city of hated Soviet-imposed names, the old name was rapidly and boldly, restored, in its translative Lithuanian form, Žydų gatvė.

Posted in Arts, Commemorations for Destroyed Communities, Dovid Katz, Events, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Museums, News & Views, Opinion | Comments Off

Virtual Yiddish Mini Museum of Old Jewish Vilna

Posted on 15 July 2019 by Defending History

APOLOGIES!

THIS PAGE HAS MOVED HERE

Posted in Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Museums, News & Views | Comments Off

Is Latvia Really Trying to Shut Down Riga’s Famous Outdoor Holocaust Museum?

Posted on 23 October 2020 by Defending History

LATVIA | MUSEUMS

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RIGA—According to various media reports, including JTA and the Algemeiner, plans are afoot to force the closure of the Museum of the Riga Ghetto and the Latvian Holocaust, whose opening Defending History covered a decade ago. The beloved outdoor museum is one of the very few museums in Latvia to provide an accurate historic view of the Holocaust and large scale individualized commemoration of its victims in Latvia. The role of local collaborators and the antisemitic nationalist establishment in Latvia in 1941 is amply documented by facsimiles of newspapers and documents of the times, all with full translation. On the commemoration front, there is a permanent outdoor exhibit with virtually all c. 70,000 names of the Riga Ghetto’s victims inscribed. It is a unique institution, for the Baltics and far beyond.

Posted in Christian-Jewish Issues, Latvia, Litvak Affairs, Museums, News & Views, Politics of Memory | Tagged Antisemitism in Latvia, Holocaust in Latvia, Holocaust remembrance in Latvia, Museum of Riga Ghetto & Latvian Holocaust, Rabbi Menachem Barkan, Riga Ghetto, Riga Holocaust Museum, Shamir Association (Riga) | Comments Off

Rewriting of History in Brussels at a Strange New Museum: “House of European History”

Posted on 26 October 2020 by Defending History

OPINION | MUSEUMS | PRAGUE PLATFORM | EU | BELGIUM

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by Tord Björk

The Nazis wanted to exterminate a race and Karl Marx wanted to exterminate a social class. Our guide at the House of European History museum (HEH) in Brussels is twisting her tongue as she tries to solve the task of simultaneously explaining that Communism and Nazism are the same thing, and yet, somehow not. Visually, the impression of the museum’s exhibition is overwhelmingly slanted toward the notion that they are fully, inexorably and inherently equivalent.

Towering above us in the ideologically most intense part of the museum are huge video screens tilted towards the visitor. These screens, on four islands in the room, are so large that in spite of the hall being generously spacious, they fill up the room. The spectator can feel small in their shadow. On the screens the masses march in honor of the dictator, people are violently oppressed and the imagery makes this museum’s point very clearly: the interwar period was marked by the very same conflict as that after the war until the Soviet Union collapsed and the Berlin wall fell. That single conflict that is posited as God’s-honest-truth-fact is between Western democracy and (any kind of) totalitarianism. The technically impressive format is meticulously balanced: two huge screens each for the horrific methods of Communism and Nazism. The similarity is indeed visually striking. Stalin and Hitler—in that order— are omnipresent in the midst of terror. As a climax, the hammer and the sickle are projected at the same time as the swastika in meticulously equal format.

Posted in Belgium, EU, Museums, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, Prague "Platform" | Tagged House of European History (Brussels), Prague Declaration, Prague Platform for European Conscience, Tord Björk | Comments Off

Several Brushstrokes of our Rachel’s Portrait

Posted on 26 January 2021 by Defending History

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by Markas Zingeris

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Rachel Kostanian-Danzig, one of the founders of the Vilna Gaon Museum of Jewish History, is celebrating her venerable ninety-first birthday. She belongs to the generation that survived the horrific years of the Second World War as well the times of the Soviet regime, and saw the fall of the Iron Curtain: the geopolitical “earthquake” that allowed Lithuania to take back control of its own history.

During her youth in Soviet times, Rachel completed a law degree at Vilnius University and qualified as an English teacher at the city’s Pedagogical University. Her field was not history, until the breakup of the Soviet Union and the rise of Lithuanian liberty gave her the freedom to immerse herself in the history and culture of her Jewish people. But no historian’s diplomas could match her relentless, painstaking and passionate desire to meaningfully fill the gaps in Lithuanian collective memory. Today’s young professionals could envy her enthusiasm and “engagement.”

Posted in Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Museums, News & Views, Rachel Kostanian | Tagged Christoph Dieckmann, Emanuelis Zingeris, Markas Zingeris, Rachel Kostanian, Saulius Suziedelis, Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum, Vilna Ghetto | Comments Off

Good Wishes Pour In for Rachel Kostanian’s 91st Birthday on 31 Jan. 2021

Posted on 31 January 2021 by Defending History

[last update]

A selection from tributes received. More on Facebook

Sepp Brudermann (Austrian film maker, former volunteer at the Green House):

“Dear Rachel, 20 years have passed, but believe it or not, I often think of you and the Green House, I tell people about you, and all the wonderful people I met – and I hope to be able to see you again my dear Rachel. Today, celebrate your birthday, celebrate LIFE! HAPPY BIRTHDAY my dear! Rachel! Lots of love and a big hug Sepp.” See also Sepp Brudermann’s video tribute.

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Ambassador Simon Butt (Ambassador of the United Kingdom to Lithuania, 2008-2011):

“Dear Rachel: on your 91st birthday I would like to congratulate you on a life well lived and for the huge contribution you have made to the cause of maintaining the history of Lithuanian Jewry. The Green House, in its intimacy, scope and historical erudition celebrates a vibrant pre-war culture as well as commemorating its tragic eradication. Its modest appearance disguises the riches it contains — a portrait of an entire civilisation. Through your dedication and scholarship, you have shared those riches with many visitors, including the descendants of the community immortalised in the museum’s displays. That their memory lives on is thanks in no small part to the work you have done; and all who have enjoyed your company honour you for it. With all good wishes, Simon Butt, UK Ambassador, 2008-11.”

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Ambassador Dónal Denham (Ambassador of Ireland to Lithuania, 2006-2010):

Posted in Ambassador Simon Butt, Ambassador Steinar Gil, Ireland, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Museums, News & Views, Rachel Kostanian | Tagged Ambassador Donal Denham, Holocaust museum in Vilnius, Holocaust museums, Jeremy Leigh, Myra Sklarew, Prof. Amelia M. Glaser, Rachel Kostanian, Sepp Brudermann, Shivaun Woolfson | Comments Off

Berlin Press Release on German President’s Award of Order of Merit to Rachel Kostanian

Posted on 22 February 2021 by Defending History

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The following press release was received today from the office of Lukas Welz, chairman of the board of AMCHA Germany, who nominated Rachel Kostanian for the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. Contacts: Email: info@amcha.de. Twitter: @amchade. Facebook: www.facebook.com/amcha.deutschland.

See also: Defending History’s report on the event; tributes and good wishes published on Ms. Kostanian’s 91st birthday; and DH’s Rachel Kostanian section.

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Rachel Kostanian Awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany

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From left: Rachel Kostanian; Andreas Görgen, head of the Directorate-General for Culture and Communication of Germany’s Federal Foreign Office; Lukas Welz, chairman of AMCHA Germany. Below: The Order of Merit. Photos: Florian Krauss for AMCHA Germany.

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BERLIN—Rachel Kostanian was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany on February 9, 2021 in Berlin for her lifelong work in researching and remembering the Holocaust in Lithuania. For a quarter century she was director of a small but world-renowned and unique Holocaust museum in Vilnius, Lithuania, known as The Green House that she co-founded as Soviet rule was crumbling in the late 1980s.

Posted in Germany, It Pays to Defend History: Success Over the Years..., Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Museums, News & Views, Rachel Kostanian | Tagged AMCHA Germany, Andreas Görgen, German Presidential Order of Merit, Holocaust educators, Holocaust in Lihtuania, Holocaust mueseums, Lukas Welz, Rachel Kostanian | Comments Off

President of Germany Honors Major East European ‘History Dissident’ Rachel Kostanian, Longtime Head of Vilnius’s Only Holocaust Museum

Posted on 22 February 2021 by Defending History

RACHEL KOSTANIAN | TRIBUTES ON HER 91ST BIRTHDAY | MUSEUMS | GERMANY

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Andreas Görgen, head of the Directorate-General for Culture and Communication of Germany’s Federal Foreign Office presents Rachel Kostanian the Presidential Order of Merit signed by President Frank-Walter Steinmeier. Lukas Welz, chairman of AMCHA Germany was there and issued today’s press release. Photos: Florian Krauss for AMCHA Germany.

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Rachel Kostanian in 2010

VILNIUS—Rachel Kostanian, doyenne of Holocaust history dissidents in Lithuania and beyond led, for over a quarter century, a tiny little museum in a wooden green house — it came to be known internationally as The Green House — high up a driveway invisible from the street, that insisted on telling the bitter truth about the Holocaust. Though part of the state’s Jewish museum complex officially, she personally raised support for its own major projects and publications and kept the editorial control independent. Her museum told the truth about the Lithuanian Holocaust, starting with the mass campaign of murder, plunder, humiliation and violence unleashed by the “Lithuanian Activist Front” (LAF), and other local “White-Armbanders” before the first German soldiers even arrived in June 1941. The huge “Genocide Museum” on the city’s main boulevard, by contrast, some seven minutes’ walk away, has a large hall dedicated to glorification of these same collaborators as supposedly heroic leaders of an anti-Soviet “rebellion” (a strange term here, as the Soviets were fleeing Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa, the largest invasion in human history, not the local white-armbanded fascists). As it turns out, the issue comes to the fore in 2021, with the 80th anniversary of the events looming, and the nation’s parliament having named the year in honor of an LAF member accused of atrocities.

Posted in Events, Germany, It Pays to Defend History: Success Over the Years..., Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Museums, News & Views, Rachel Kostanian | Comments Off

Malát (Molėtai) Museum, in Northeast Lithuania, Invites ‘All the World’ to 29th August Memorial Events

Posted on 23 August 2021 by Defending History

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All Welcome!

Sunday 29 August 2021

Eighty years ago to the day, 29 Aug. 1941, all the town’s Jewish residents were massacred in the Holocaust, mostly by local white-armbander (“LAF”) fascists in partnership with occupying Nazi forces

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At the regional museum’s initiative, bilingual signs mark out the Jewish cultural heritage. More here.

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Defending History has a Malát section, which has followed the events — and their meaning — over the last five years

Posted in Christian-Jewish Issues, Commemorations for Destroyed Communities, Events, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Malát (Molėtai), Museums, News & Views | Tagged Holocaust in Lithuania, Malat (Moletai), Malát (Molėtai) Jewish history, shtetl commemorations, Tzvi Kritzer, Viktorija Kazlienė | Comments Off

Will Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas Remove Nazi-Collaborator Shrines as it Honors the Great Leonidas Donskis?

Posted on 1 September 2021 by Defending History

OPINION | DONSKIS SECTION | MUSEUMS | COLLABORATORS GLORIFIED | KAUNAS: 2022 CAPITAL OF EUROPEAN CULTURE

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Click on the image for details of 21 Sept. conference in Kaunas on role of museums in remembering the past

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Vytautas Magnus University, once considered a beacon of tolerance and liberalism, suffered extensive (utterly self-inflicted) reputational damage back in 2009 when it inaugurated a lecture hall and bas-relief glorifying Juozas Ambrezevicius Brazaitis, “prime minister” in Lithuania’s Nazi puppet “provisional government” in 1941. During his brief period as Hitler’s chief puppet in the country, he signed documents confirming transfer of numerous Jewish fellow citizens of his native Kaunas to the nearby Seventh Fort for torture and murder, and later signed the Nazi-ordered documents ordering all remaining Jews of Kaunas into a ghetto, to become the infamous Kovno Ghetto. During his later American career, as a CIA asset and academic, he never once expressed regret over what had happened to the 30,000 Jewish residents of Kaunas.

Then, in 2012, when an international scandal broke out over the Lithuanian government’s decision to fly over and rebury with full honors the Nazi puppet prime minister’s remains, it was, alas a top historian and academic official at Vytautas Magnus who described the reburial as a grand act of Lithuania’s historic drama, while denouncing the Leonidas Donskis led effort to pull the university out of national ceremonies honoring the Nazi collaborator, in these terms: “This wasn’t the academic community but a decision of the VMU administration which became frightened that they were going to get hit over the head with a club by the Jews.” For context, see events of May 2012.

LEONIDAS DONSKIS SECTION IN DEFENDING HISTORY

Posted in Collaborators Glorified, Leonidas Donskis, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Museums, News & Views, Opinion | Tagged Ambrezevicius-Brazaitis, Holocaust in Lithuania, Holocaust Memory, Leonias Donskis, Vytautas Magnus University | Comments Off

Elena Rimdžiūtė: Video of Christian Witness to the Holocaust in Šeduva, in Northern Lithuania

Posted on 24 October 2021 by Defending History

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VILNIUS—The Lithuanian Yiddish Video Archive (LYVA), a Defending History affiliated project, providing hundreds of Yiddish language video interviews in the “Lithuanian lands” (today’s Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, eastern Ukraine and northeastern Poland), conducted from 1990 to 2020 has just released a Holocaust-history extract from a longer interview, conducted in May 2000 in Šeduva, northern Lithuania, with the town’s last Yiddish speaker, the Christian Lithuanian native of the town, the late Elena Rimdžiūtė. As is evident from the clip, the interviewer, Dovid Katz, was focused on Elena’s Yiddish folksongs, and the Holocaust arises, at first tangentially, when Elena speaks of her friends who are no more.

See DH’s Šeduva section

The clip on Youtube is accompanied by a draft English translation (in the “Description Box”). This remarkable woman’s honesty, integrity, and desire to Just Tell it Straight, makes for a striking contrast with the current Baltic academic establishment’s claptrap about Prague Declarations, equivalence of totalitarian regimes, tale of two Holocausts, and fairy tales about the “uprising against the Soviets” celebrated in Vilnius’s Genocide Museum (recently renamed), and promoted by the state-sponsored Genocide Center and numerous public shrines to local Holocaust murderers of 1941.

Here is Ms. Rimdžiūtė’s genuine Šeduva Yiddish rendition of the beloved song, where a girl explains that she wants neither new clothes from the tailor nor shoes from the shoemaker but expresses her sadness that all the other girls have boys (altered in the final stanza to ‘get married’). The clip is followed by a draft English translation concluding with a transcription of song in Šeduva Yiddish.

Posted in Documents, Film, History, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Museums, News & Views, Šeduva (Sheduva, Shádeve, Shádov) and its Free-of-Jewish-Staff "Museum of the Lost Shtetl" | Tagged Elena Rimdziute, Holocaust in Lithuania, Holocaust in Seduva (Shadeve) Lithuania, Lithuania, Lost Shtetl Museum (Seduva, Seduva Jewis | Comments Off

The Holocaust in Šeduva, a Town in Northern Lithuania

Posted on 4 January 2022 by Defending History

ŠEDUVA | HISTORY | MUSEUMS | POLITICS OF MEMORY | SHTETL COMMEMORATIONS

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by Evaldas Balčiūnas

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Just like each and every other town in Lithuania, Šeduva (Sheduva) has as the most barbarous episode of it history the Lithuanian Holocaust. It is not easy to tell this story. There are many narratives that contradict each other, with many omitted or unclear episodes. The omissions can be partly explained by the current policy of historical memory in Lithuania, as well as by the authority of some organizations that thsemlves took active part in these horrible events. Narratives that are unfavorable to them are denied, downplayed, or classified as “information warfare” (in other words: “Russia”). I have previously written about the difficulty in asssessing assorted narratives here.

The summary version of of the Šeduva Jews’ massacre that I recounted includes these critical dates:

June 25, 1941: The Nazis occupy Šeduva.

July 22, 1941: Šeduva’s Jews are driven into the town’s ghetto established to incarcerate its Jewish citizens.

August 25t, 1941: The city’s 665 Jews are murdered in Liaudiškiai forest. But a few of the Jewish families of volunteers (veterans) of Lithuania’s War of Independence in 1918 are “allowed” to live, under the condition that they abandon their Jewishness and get baptized. The residents of Šeduva and its vicinity observe the public baptism at the church. A couple of weeks later those baptized are driven to Panevėžys and also shot dead, like all their unbaptized brethren who were not “saved by baptism” for having volunteered over two decades earlier to fight in the nation’s War of Independence. The only one who survived was Ms. S. Nolienė, who was hidden by the priest M. Karosas.

Posted in Evaldas Balčiūnas, History, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Museums, News & Views, Šeduva (Sheduva, Shádeve, Shádov) and its Free-of-Jewish-Staff "Museum of the Lost Shtetl" | Tagged Evaldas Balciunas, Holocaust in Lithuania, Holocaust in Seduva, Lithuania, Lost Shtetl Museum (Seduva, Šeduva | Comments Off

A Jewish Museum Without a Single Jewish Staff Member? (in a country with 3,000 Jewish citizens)

Posted on 6 February 2022 by Defending History

[UPDATE / original publication 1 Feb. 2022]

Opinion | Sheduva, Lithuania | Museums | Litvak Affairs

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2022 is “Can you imagine?” year…

Can you imagine a museum in South Africa dedicated to the history of Apartheid without a single African member of staff on site?

Can you imagine a museum in Mississippi on Confederate state slavery without a single African American member of staff on site?

Can you imagine a museum of Lithuanian shtetl history in Lithuania without a single Jewish member of staff on site?

Yes.

Posted in Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Museums, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, Šeduva (Sheduva, Shádeve, Shádov) and its Free-of-Jewish-Staff "Museum of the Lost Shtetl", South Africa | Tagged Šeduva (Sheduva), Šeduva + Holocaust, Šeduva + Jewish, Šeduva Museum of Lost Shtetl | Comments Off

New York Jewish Museum: Latest to be Duped into “Legitimizing” Lithuanian Far-Right Holocaust Revisionism?

Posted on 25 April 2022 by Defending History

MUSEUMS | JEWISH EVENTS ABUSED TO MAKE “KOSHER” HOLOCAUST REVISIONISM | POLITICS OF MEMORY | COLLABORATORS WHITEWASHED

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Is New York City’s Jewish Museum the Latest Western Jewish Institution to be Duped into “Legitimizing” Lithuanian Nationalists’ Far-Right Holocaust Revisionism?

See Michael Casper’s new exposé in Jewish Currents

Are “useful Jewish idiots” addicted to photo-ops, funding and junkets being duped into joining “Kaunas Capital of European Culture 2022” year? (without Kaunas removing a single public monument to Holocaust perps)

For background see Defending History’s coverage of the revisionists’ “Jewish cover-it-up investments” over more than a dozen years

Andrius Kulikauskas on the Greimas exhibit at Lithuania’s National Mažvydas Library (2017); on the Library’s setting up of the Adolfas Damušis Center glorifying a Nazi collaborator (2017)

Dovid Katz on the (ab)use of East European museums to “legitimize” Double Genocide and far-right Holocaust revisionism; Defending History’s Museums section

Posted in "Jewish" Events as Cover?, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Museums, News & Views, Politics of Memory, United States, What Do Fake Litvak Games Look Like? | Tagged Holocaust Revisionism, Michael Casper, New York Jewish Museum | Comments Off

Rachel Kostanian’s Inspiring Life Story (and Message) Now on German Wikipedia

Posted on 23 September 2022 by Defending History

RACHEL KOSTANIAN | LITHUANIA | LITVAK AFFAIRS

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Vilnius Cinderella Comes to the Ball (belatedly, and in Berlin)

German Wikipedia’s new entry tells the tale of Lituhania’s Rachel (Rokhl, Rochel) Kostanian, who for decades led a one-woman campaign in Vilnius for truth about the Holocaust, standing up to some very powerful forces. She was a co-founder and long time director of The Green House in Vilnius. Photo: Rachel in Berlin with Thomas Pfanne, former German cultural attaché in Lithuania, after she was honored by the president of Germany. See Defending History’s Rachel Kostanian section.

Posted in Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Museums, News & Views, Rachel Kostanian | Comments Off

Wollongong, Australia is a Long Way from Kaunas, Lithuania: Discovering a Holocaust Collaborator Among Us

Posted on 15 November 2022 by Defending History

LITHUANIA | HISTORY | KAUNAS | MUSEUMS

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by Michael Samaras

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Michael Samaras at the Wollongong Art Gallery in Australia

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Wollongong, an Australian city located about 80 kilometres south of Sydney, is a long way from Lithuania’s Kaunas, which probably made it attractive to Bronius Sredersas. He arrived in 1950, having fled Lithuania ahead of the Red Army in 1944. For the next 25 years Sredersas, one of more than 100,000 displaced persons to settle in Australia, worked in Wollongong’s steelworks. He led an unobtrusive life and acquired an anglicised nickname, “Bob”. He never married and didn’t waste his money. Instead, he saved his pay, frequented auction houses and with a canny eye built a substantial art collection.

In 1976, Sredersas shocked the citizens of his adopted city by presenting his art collection to them. For an industrial city like Wollongong, which didn’t even have an art gallery, this gift was a sensation. It triggered the establishment of the Wollongong Art Gallery which has since grown into a major regional cultural institution.

Sredersas was widely celebrated in the media and an exhibition space within the new gallery was named in his honor. After his death in 1982, his memory was preserved with eminent persons giving lectures in his memory. The gallery erected a plaque and hosted the Sredersas Dinner as a fundraising social event.

In 2018, the gallery staged a major exhibition celebrating Sredersas. Titled “The Gift”, the exhibition included a recreation of his home, a display of the artworks, a video, and a symposium on his life and benefaction.

Publicity for the exhibition included mention that in Lithuania, Sredersas had been a policeman. While I was aware of Sredersas’ life as a steelworker in Australia, his prior career as a policeman was new to me. I knew though that the Nazis had relied on local collaborators, formed into police battalions, to carry out the Holocaust in Lithuania. I was appalled at the possibility that Wollongong, my home town, might be honoring a Holocaust perpetrator and decided to see if I could find out more.

Posted in Australia, History, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Michael Samaras, Museums, News & Views, Politics of Memory | Tagged Bronislaus Schroeders, Bronius Sredersas, Efraim Zuroff, Evaldas Balciunas, International Refugee Organisation (IRA), Joe Melamed, Konrad Kwiet, Michael Samaras, Paul Daley (Guardian), SD (Sicherheitsdienst), Sydney Jewish Museum | Comments Off

Roza Bieliauskienė (1946 – 2023): Cofounder of Lithuania’s Jewish Museum, Longtime Chief Curator, Educator, Specialist on Litvak Artists

Posted on 29 January 2023 by Defending History

ROZA BIELIAUSKIENE | OBITUARIES | MUSEUMS

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The following is a revised text of Dovid Katz’s obituary that appeared on his Facebook page today.

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Roza Bieliauskienė (1946-2023)

The world of Jewish Vilna and Litvaks everywhere mourn in deep sorrow the untimely sudden death of our dear Roza (Róze, Reyzl) Bieliauskienė, beloved scholar of Lithuanian Jewish art, long time historian, museum curator, educator, guide and a loyal friend unafraid of untoward local politics and its boycotts. Whether for an old friend or a foreigner she’d never seen before, Roza would rush to help anyone research anything if it was in the field of Lithuanian Jewish culture, history. Here is our 2 hour+ interview with her (entirely in Yiddish) from less than a year ago (recorded and posted in the Lithuanian Yiddish Video Archive (LYVA) thanks to the generosity of Remembering Litvaks Inc).

Posted in Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Museums, News & Views, Obituaries, Roza Bieliauskienė | Tagged Jews in Vilnius, Lithuania + Jews, Roza Bieliauskiene, Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum of Lithuania, Yiddish in Vilnius, ראָזאַ ביעליאַוסקיענע | Comments Off

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Museums | Genocide Museum | Genocide Center | Double Genocide | Collaborators Glorified | Lithuania

by Dovid Katz

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OPINION | MUSEUMS | SHEDUVA | POLITICS OF MEMORY | SHTETL COMMEMORATIONS | HUMOR (OF SORTS)

by Evaldas Balčiūnas

Evaldas Balčiūnas informed the English speaking world of a series of state honors for alleged Holocaust collaborators, starting with Jonas Noreika back in 2012. He paid a hefty personal price for it (scroll down his DH section to 2014).

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OPINION | MUSEUMS & EXHIBITIONS | THE ARTS | LITVAK AFFAIRS | YIDDISH AFFAIRS

by Dovid Katz

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APOLOGIES!

LATVIA | MUSEUMS

OPINION | MUSEUMS | PRAGUE PLATFORM | EU | BELGIUM

by Tord Björk

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by Markas Zingeris

[last update]

A selection from tributes received. More on Facebook

See also: Defending History’s Rachel Kostanian section

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Sepp Brudermann (Austrian film maker, former volunteer at the Green House):

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Ambassador Simon Butt (Ambassador of the United Kingdom to Lithuania, 2008-2011):

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Ambassador Dónal Denham (Ambassador of Ireland to Lithuania, 2006-2010):

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Rachel Kostanian Awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany

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RACHEL KOSTANIAN | TRIBUTES ON HER 91ST BIRTHDAY | MUSEUMS | GERMANY

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Eighty years ago to the day, 29 Aug. 1941, all the town’s Jewish residents were massacred in the Holocaust, mostly by local white-armbander (“LAF”) fascists in partnership with occupying Nazi forces

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OPINION | DONSKIS SECTION | MUSEUMS | COLLABORATORS GLORIFIED | KAUNAS: 2022 CAPITAL OF EUROPEAN CULTURE

ŠEDUVA | HISTORY | MUSEUMS | POLITICS OF MEMORY | SHTETL COMMEMORATIONS

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by Evaldas Balčiūnas

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[UPDATE / original publication 1 Feb. 2022]

Opinion | Sheduva, Lithuania | Museums | Litvak Affairs

2022 is “Can you imagine?” year…

Can you imagine a museum in South Africa dedicated to the history of Apartheid without a single African member of staff on site?

Can you imagine a museum in Mississippi on Confederate state slavery without a single African American member of staff on site?

Can you imagine a museum of Lithuanian shtetl history in Lithuania without a single Jewish member of staff on site?

Yes.

MUSEUMS | JEWISH EVENTS ABUSED TO MAKE “KOSHER” HOLOCAUST REVISIONISM | POLITICS OF MEMORY | COLLABORATORS WHITEWASHED

Is New York City’s Jewish Museum the Latest Western Jewish Institution to be Duped into “Legitimizing” Lithuanian Nationalists’ Far-Right Holocaust Revisionism?

For background see Defending History’s coverage of the revisionists’ “Jewish cover-it-up investments” over more than a dozen years

Andrius Kulikauskas on the Greimas exhibit at Lithuania’s National Mažvydas Library (2017); on the Library’s setting up of the Adolfas Damušis Center glorifying a Nazi collaborator (2017)

Dovid Katz on the (ab)use of East European museums to “legitimize” Double Genocide and far-right Holocaust revisionism; Defending History’s Museums section

RACHEL KOSTANIAN | LITHUANIA | LITVAK AFFAIRS

Vilnius Cinderella Comes to the Ball (belatedly, and in Berlin)

LITHUANIA | HISTORY | KAUNAS | MUSEUMS

by Michael Samaras

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ROZA BIELIAUSKIENE | OBITUARIES | MUSEUMS

The following is a revised text of Dovid Katz’s obituary that appeared on his Facebook page today.

Roza Bieliauskienė (1946-2023)

**Scholars & journalists: When you use DH, please cite DH.**