News & Views

Why Christine Beresniova is Out of Order



O P I N I O N

by Geoff Vasil

 

I’ve never met Christine Beresniova, but I’ve followed her career, so to speak, through the media and mutual acquaintances, and wish her only the best. She first came to my attention after apparently making some very limited and not very public criticisms of Lithuanian Holocaust education, which sufficiently pissed off the Holocaust Obfuscation establishment ensconced within the corridors of state power for them to label her some kind of Russian agent in informal conversations.

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2013 Started on Wrong Note in Capitals of Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania



WARSAW:  Statue of “Praying Hitler” is unveiled in the Warsaw Ghetto. Reports in the GuardianDaily MailHuffington Post.

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LGBT Equality Protests Removal of July 2013 March from Vilnius’s Central Boulevard


LGBT Equality (the LGL — Lithuanian Gay League) today issued a statement on its website  urging the Vilnius municipality to change its heart over a decision to ban the Baltic Pride march from the capital’s center in the summer of 2013, just as Lithuania will proudly be assuming the rotating chairmanship of the European Union. The statement follows an earlier 16 January statement.

In the meantime, a nationalist website has announced that the March 11th 2013 neo-Nazi march will proceed on the capital’s central boulevard as always, irrespective of any requests from the municipality. The statement is signed by a former long-term high official of the Genocide Research Center who was involved in organizing various neo-Nazi marches and defending them publicly.Continue reading

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US Researcher is Persuaded that the Problem in Lithuania is called “Zuroff and Katz”



O P I N I O N

by Dovid Katz

The blog Christine Beresniova and Rokas Beresniovas recently published the article “A lamentable absence of sexy scandals.” We will refrain from comment on their understanding of the concept “sexy scandals” and stick to the work of fellow human rights advocates, which entails standing up to powerful establishments on behalf of minorities, victims of prejudice, and in the case of Eastern Europe, the victims (and handful of survivors) of genocide. Those who stand up know all too well that to do so is not all that often convenient, easygoing or self-serving.

Beresniovas and Beresniova Website Banner (2013)

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New Paper by Per Anders Rudling on the Ukrainian Far Right


An important new paper by Dr. Per Anders Rudling of Lund University, Sweden, has appeared in the new volume, Analysing Fascist Discourse: European Fascism in Talk and Text. The collective volume brought out by Routledge (New York & London) is edited by Ruth Wodak and John E. Richardson.

Dr. Rudling’s paper, entitled “The Return of the Ukrainian Far Right: The Case of VO Svoboda” comprises the sections:

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Lithuanian Supreme Court Upholds Algirdas Paleckis Verdict in Freedom-of-Speech Trial; Appeal to Strasbourg Planned


The small courtroom in the building of the Lithuanian Supreme Court a few yards away from the nation’s Seimas, or parliament, was packed with journalists and mostly older generation nationalist opponents of Algirdas Paleckis. Two judges, speaking in different sections, upheld the earlier verdict against him for having proposed a version of events for January 13th 1991 that is at odds with national historiography.

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Red-Brown Commission’s Newest Layer of Obfuscation: Are Names of Members Secret?


The Lithuanian government sponsored “International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupational Regimes of Lithuania,” known for short as the “Red-Brown Commission” has recently added a new layer of obfuscation and opacity to its activities.

Its website has deleted the names of the “Members of the Commission” thereby rendering it a kind of “secret society.”

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Sutzkever Translation Prize: American Poets in Discourse on “Being a Judge in a Judenrat Circumstance”


The New York office of Cross-Cultural Communications Press today released the following statement by its director, poet and publisher Stanley H. Barkan, in response to a 26 Dec 2012 Forward article on the recently announced Abraham Sutzkever Translation Prize competition. Sutzkever (1913-2010), a Vilna Ghetto survivor and Jewish partisan, was a major Yiddish poet and editor.

The prize is related to events to be held in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, next summer on the centenary of Sutzkever’s birth. Details of the award and an opinion piece on its problematic aspects appeared earlier, on 6 Dec 2012, in Defending History. The text of Mr. Barkan’s statement first appeared in the Comments section following the Forward report.

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An International Appeal from the Head of the Ukrainian Independent Council of Jewish Women



O P I N I O N

by Eleonora Groisman

The author is president of The Ukrainian Independent Council of Jewish Women, and edits the newspaper Jewish Kiev. Authorized translation into English provided by the author is by Mr. Valery Novoselsky (executive editor of Public Diplomacy Network and of Roma Virtual Network). See: 

http://evreiskiy.kiev.ua
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Jewish_Daily_News/message/92
http://www.facebook.com/evreiskiy.kiev.ua


Appeal to the representatives of international governmental and non-governmental organizations by a group of social organizations and citizens of different countries concerned about the growth of antisemitism in Ukraine:

In the 2012 elections to the Verkhovna Rada the far-right nationalist Svoboda party passed. To date, the Svoboda fraction has 37 parliament members, within the total of 450 parliament members.

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Instead of Truth about the Holocaust – Myths about Saving Jews



O P I N I O N

by Pinchos Fridberg


Editor’s note [updated 27 January 2013]:
Pinchos Fridberg, a native and resident of Vilnius, is a Holocaust survivor. He graduated from Vilnius University in 1961 and completed his PhD in theoretical and mathematical physics in 1965 and an additional doctoral science degree in radio physics in 1974. From 1961 to 1978 he was chair of the Laboratory of Theoretical Investigations at the Vilnius Scientific Institute of Radio Measuring Devices. In 1978 he joined Grodno State University, where he was named professor. In 1989 he became head of the Department of Theoretical Radio Physics at the Zondas Company in Vilnius.

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2013: Call on US State Dept to Reject Politics of Holocaust Denial and Appeasement of Eastern Europe’s New Far Right




Shock of 2012:
 When a NATO-EU Ally Reburied and Glorified its 1941 Nazi Puppet Prime Minister who Signed Orders for Kovno Ghetto

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Shock of 2012: 1941 Nazi Puppet Prime Minister Reburied with Full Honors



Compiled by Dovid Katz

EU/NATO Ally Honors Holocaust Collaborator; Lithuanian Jewish Community Issues Protest; 3 US Congressmen Write to Prime Minister

Remains of 1941 fascist leader  Juozas Ambrazevičius (Brazaitis) met by honor guard at Vilnius Airport on 17 May 2012 and reburied in Kaunas’s Church of the Resurrection on the 20th, as city’s mayor dismisses criticism.

Office of the prime minister, who signed off on government funding (€8,700 / US $11,000)defends reburial & honors of the 1941 Nazi puppet “prime minister” who personally signed the protocols confirming Nazi orders for (1) “all means” against Jews (but avoiding executions in public); (2)  setting up a concentration camp for Lithuanian Jews [euphemism for the carnage underway at the Seventh Fort]; (3) all Kaunas Jews to be herded into a ghetto within 4 weeks (English here).

SEE ALSO:

Collaborators Glorified section

Previous sanitization program

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Tell Me I’m Wrong



O P I N I O N

by Geoff Vasil

I caught part of the Lithuanian “International” Red-Brown Commission’s “international” conference in the Lithuanian parliament last month, and obtained video of the parts I missed. There are a lot of things intellectually wrong with what the majority of the speakers said, but I can’t help thinking, feeling, that the emotional content was the overriding message, not the various sophistic, sham arguments and contrived non-debate “debate” between Emanuelis Zingeris and other speakers.

It was my feeling that only two of the speakers really spoke with any reverence or respect for the dead, in a tone appropriate to discussing the subject at hand. One was a sociologist I’d never heard of before who spoke in simple statistical figures about current popular Lithuanian views of the Holocaust and Jews.

The other was Saulius Sužiedėlis, a Lithuanian-American scholar (I believe that’s a fair way to characterize his national identity), who said so much that was simply wrong, but at least delivered his somewhat stochastic and very personal message with the sort of sincerity and honor which one expects in a seeker after truth, and which leads one to assume that even if that seeker has some of the details wrong at the moment, he will eventually get it right and will find the inner courage to correct himself.

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End of the World. And the Day After …



O P I N I O N

by Monica Lowenberg

 

It is the 24th of December 2012, three days after the announced end of the world. I am sitting at my desk drinking a cup of a tea. No gaping hole has suddenly swallowed me up, no heavens have collapsed, no earthquakes have caused Tsunamis to sweep coastal towns. My cat is blissfully unaware of the commotion millions of people around the world have caused on mountain tops, at sacred sites and even in a museum in Russia which for apparently only $1,500 offered salvation in the underground bunker of the former Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. Apparently the museum sold all 1,000 tickets in one fell swoop and I am sure now regret that they offered a 50% discount if nothing happened. Tant pis. It is amazing how people will believe anything today. Even some very intelligent people.

The last time I looked at the international petition site I set up against the SS marches in Latvia, in number one place, above any human rights cause, came the rights of Shetland ponies. I am not sure what happened to the Shetland ponies but clearly something must have, as thousands and thousands of people across the world vitriolically and vociferously protested and voted for their rights and rightly so. However, when it comes to the rights of humans the voting finger is in most cases nowhere to be seen.

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December 2012 London Conference at UCL and Protest (Box Coverage to 24 Dec)



DOCUMENTS: Petition (with links; with select signatures) ◊ Petitioner’s dossierUPDATES: Petition’s first effect ◊ Jewish Chronicle ◊ London Jewish News ◊ UCL Hebrew Dept lets Holocaust survivors down ◊ Disinformation campaign ◊ Monica Lowenberg looks back at the events (24 Dec. 2012)LETTERS: Alumnus writes to provost (& to ambassador) ◊ Ruth Barnett ◊ Hans Coppi  (English) ◊ (Rachel Margolis’s cousin) Budd Margolis ◊ Gert Weisskirchen

PROTEST AT LITHUANIAN EMBASSY IN LONDON

VIDEO FROM THE EVENT: 12, and 3

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Within Days of Monica Lowenberg’s Petition, Vilnius Municipality Tries to Move March 11th 2013 Neo-Nazi March Away from City Center


Several days after Monica Lowenberg’s petition was presented to the Lithuanian embassy in London, one of the petition’s points was partly acted on, at least as far as a press release goes, by a governmental agency in Lithuania, notably the Vilnius municipality.

PUBLIC PETITIONS HAVE AN EFFECT!

Point no. 4 of Ms. Lowenberg’s petition reads:

4) A commitment to disallow the neo-Nazi parades in the city centres of Vilnius and Kaunas on national Independence Day holidays in 2013 (with no prejudice to reassignment of venues on free speech grounds to sites and dates that do not heavily imply state support).

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UCL Professor who Denied Holocaust Survivors Five Minutes to Read Petition to Lithuanian Government, Sings Different Tune Schnoring $$$ for Lithuanian “Study Trips”


Professor Michael Berkowitz of University College London’s Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies, an expert on Lithuanian Jewish studies, was the member of staff who told London petitioner Monica Lowenberg on 14 December 2012 that Brandeis Professor Antony Polonsky’s banning of the reading of a  five minute petition would be upheld by the UCL department (correspondence here; background on the UCL saga here—best enjoyed in chronological order from the bottom upwards…).

The text of the petition and list of international signatories to date is available on Change.org.

Professor Polonsky was knighted by the president of Lithuania earlier this year for services to that country’s efforts to improve its Jewish PR profile, a PR profile that has suffered difficulty from repeated state honoring of Nazi collaborators and perpetrators, state defamation of Holocaust survivors who joined the resistance, and state investment in a revised far-right-based historical model for World War II.

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Estonia’s Severe Case of Holocaust Amnesia



O P I N I O N

by Efraim Zuroff

From today’s Times of Israel.


 

The visit to Israel of a foreign prime minister used to be a big deal. That’s why there were so many photos of Burmese head of state U Nu’s visit in the early sixties. Those days, however, are long gone and today when most prime ministers visit us it’s usually of little or no interest to anybody and they get almost no coverage unless they are major world figures.

That would help explain why I only found out Tuesday morning that Estonian Prime Minister Andrus Ansip was to be touring Yad Vashem that day.

Ostensibly, that is no occasion of any particular significance, and the visit is more or less a pro forma requirement for any head of state coming to Israel in that capacity, especially if he or she has never been here before. But that is not true in the case of the Estonian leader, who heads a country that is suffering from a severe Baltic variant of post-Communist Eastern European Holocaust amnesia. This is an intellectual disease whose four main characteristics are a systematic minimization of crimes by local Nazi collaborators, a distinct lack of political will to prosecute and punish such individuals, a tendency to glorify locals who fought alongside the Nazis – in Estonia’s case in Waffen-SS units – and a determination to promote the historical canard of supposed equivalency between Nazi and Communist crimes.

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Gert Weisskirchen’s Open Letter to the Lithuanian Ambassador in London



The following letter was released today by Professor Weisskirchen’s office. It is followed by an English translation by Irene Fick.


Dezember 17, 2012

H.E. Ambassador Asta Skaisgiryte Liauskiene

The Embassy of Lithuania

 

Exzellenz, sehr geehrte Frau Botschafterin,

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David Cukier’s Follow-up Letter to the Provost of University College London



O P I N I O N

by David Cukier

The following is the text of the author’s letter today to the provost of University College London, following up on his earlier communication of 29 November.

  • From: David Cukier
  • To: “provost@ucl.ac.uk” <provost@ucl.ac.uk>
  • Sent: Thursday, December 13, 2012 3:38 PM
  • Subject: UCL Conference on December 17th and 18th 2012: Jews and Non-Jews in Lithuania: Coexistence, Cooperation, Violence

 

Dear Professor Grant,

I attach an earlier communication to you in which I asked you to consider the wisdom of hosting the above conference at UCL as a former student who takes great pride in having studied at UCL and the objectives and principles established by its founders.

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