Confirmation has been obtained that on Holocaust Remembrance Day, 27 January (respected internationally as the day marking the liberation of Auschwitz), Lithuanian prosecutors visited the premises of the Jewish Community of Lithuania at Pylimo Street 4, Vilnius, to question community leaders about their ‘knowledge’ of Joseph Melamed, a Holocaust survivor resident in Tel Aviv.
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Vilnius Prosecutors ‘visit’ Lithuanian Jewish Community on Holocaust Remembrance Day, questioning ties to Survivor in Tel Aviv who is the latest to be ‘investigated’
Posted in Human Rights, Israel, News & Views, Politics of Memory
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President of Croatia Honors Dr Efraim Zuroff in Zagreb
Dr Efraim Zuroff, founding director of the Israel Office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, has been awarded the Order of Prince Trpimir with Ribbon and Star, by Croatian president Stjepan Mesić. The president’s signed certificate cites Dr Zuroff’s ‘outstanding contribution to the fight against historical revisionism and reassertion of the anti-fascist foundation of the modern-day Republic of Croatia and to establishment of good relations between the Republic of Croatia and the State of Israel’. The award was presented at midday on Monday 1 February 2010 in the palace of the president of Croatia in Zagreb. Sonja Biserko, president of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights, was also honored by the Croatian president. Associated Press report here. FULL TEXTof Dr Zuroff’s acceptance speech here. Photo: At the presidential palace in Zagreb on 1 February 2010.
Dr Zuroff is also celebrating the publication of his new book, Operation Last Chance: One Man’s Quest to Bring Nazi Criminals to Justice. Order here.
Posted in Croatia, News & Views, Politics of Memory
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Blaming the Victims? State Agencies & Other Elites Defame Holocaust Survivors
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Posted in A 21st Century Campaign Against Lithuanian Holocaust Survivors?, Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky (Fania Brancovskaja): 1922-2024, Human Rights, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Politics of Memory, Vilnius's Genocide Center and the Genocide Museum it Manages
Tagged Arunas Bubnys, Campaign against Holocaust survivors, campaign against Jewish partisans, Chen Ivri Apter, Commission on Nazi and Soviet Crimes (Vilnius), Fania Brancovskaja, Fania Brantsovsky (Brancovskaja), Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky, Holocaust in Lithuania, Holocaust Revisionism (Lithuania), Jewish partisans in Lithuania, Jonathan Brent + Lithuania, Pinchos Fridberg, Rachel Margolis, Timothy Snyder, Yitzhak Arad, Yivo + Holocaust survivors
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Mass Circulation Paper attacks the Jewish Community (over Gaza) on Holocaust Remembrance Day
On Holocaust Remembrance Day, the international section (‘World’) of the popular mass-circulation daily Vakaro zinios led off with the article ‘Jews Don’t Understand Why they are Not Loved’ by an unnamed author. The first sentence starts with a reference to ‘the Jewish community’ which is locally taken to refer to today’s Vilnius Jewish community. The article goes on to explain antisemitism as the result of the previous year’s conflict in Gaza, and contains a large photograph of a scene of devastation there. Translation into English.
Posted in Antisemitism & Bias, Media Watch, News & Views
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State Prosecutors ‘Visit’ Jewish Community on Holocaust Remembrance Day to ask Questions about ALJ chief Joseph Melamed
Officials from Lithuania’s state prosecution service came to the Jewish Community’s premises at Pylimo Street 4 in Vilnius today — during a Holocaust Remembrance Day event — to ask community officials for information about Joseph Melamed, 85, a Tel Aviv resident. The news spread rapidly and caused disquiet among the small remnant community.
Attorney Joseph Melamed, a Holocaust survivor, with his Hebrew book ‘Lita’ (Lithuania) in his office at the Association of Lithuanian Jews on King David Boulevard in Tel Aviv
Mr. Melamed, head of the Association of Lithuanian Jews in Israel, possibly the world’s last active Litvak survivor organization, is himself a Holocaust (Kovno Ghetto) survivor, a veteran of the anti-Nazi partisans, veteran of the Israeli war of independence in 1948, a retired Israeli diplomat and a prominent attorney. He is the author and editor of various works about the Lithuanian Holocaust.
Prosecutors told the Lithuanian Jewish Community that they are ‘investigating’ Mr. Melamed in relation to his organization’s publication of lists of alleged local war criminals who are alleged to have participated in the annihilation of Lithuanian Jewry. A few of the people on these lists are considered ‘national heroes’ by various nationalist elements, especially those who joined the anti-Soviet resistance in and after 1944.
Posted in A 21st Century Campaign Against Lithuanian Holocaust Survivors?, Antisemitism & Bias, Events, Human Rights, Israel, News & Views, Politics of Memory, Yitzhak Arad
Tagged Association of Lithuanian Jews in Israel, Holocaust in Lithuania, Joseph Melamed, Kovno Ghetto, Lithuanian prosecutors Holocaust survivors, Litvak survivors
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U.S. Congress Protests Lithuanian Gov. Campaign against Rachel Margolis and other Holocaust Survivors who joined the anti-Nazi Resistance
On the occasion of Holocaust Remembrance Day, the Margolis family in the United States released to the media a 3 December 2009 letter from the United States Congress to the prime minister of Lithuania, protesting in no uncertain terms the campaign being waged against 88 year old historian, museum builder and biologist, Dr Rachel Margolis; 87 year old Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky, librarian of the Vilnius Yiddish Institute; and 83 year old Holocaust scholar Dr Yitzhak Arad, who was founding director of Yad Vashem. All three have been the subject of ongoing ‘investigations into war crimes’ by Lithuanian prosecutors and of extensive defamation by the country’s mainstream media. Since the saga got underway in the spring of 2006, none has been charged, and not one has been cleared. Holocaust studies specialists increasingly suspect a ruse to create a bogus paper trail of ‘investigations’ of Holocaust survivors as a diversion to the documented history of massive Baltic participation in the Nazi-led genocide of the Jewish population, as well as to the region’s dismal record of not punishing a single Nazi war criminal since independence. See the media coverage; responses to the anti-survivor campaign; critiques of the underlying ‘red=brown’ movement and the state-funded apparatus that underpins it.
Posted in A 21st Century Campaign Against Lithuanian Holocaust Survivors?, Dr. Rokhl (Rachel) Margolis (1921-2015), Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky (Fania Brancovskaja): 1922-2024, Human Rights, Lithuania, News & Views, Politics of Memory, US State Dept Manipulated?, Yitzhak Arad
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Shabad Statue Defaced in Paint Attack
The Shabad statue in Vilnius’s old town (wartime territory of the Vilna Ghetto) was defaced in a paint attack. Report on Delfi. Photo by Kirilas Cachovskis.
The sculpture, unveiled in May 2007, commemorates Dr Tsemakh Shabad (1864-1935), a near-legendary figure in Vilna Jewish lore.
Upsetting as such events are, it was rather more painful for the Jewish community when the former director of the ‘Litvak Foundation‘, who had worked tirelessly to organize the monument, came out with a highly disturbing article last summer (see below, 2009 → 16 July).
Posted in Antisemitism & Bias, News & Views
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German Parliamentarian wins award in Jerusalem, blasts the ‘Prague Declaration’
German Social Democratic parliamentarian Gert Weisskirchen was awarded a certificate of honor at the Israeli Knesset on 16 December for a lifetime of fighting antisemitism, racism, and Holocaust distortion. The Knesset session was integrated into the Global Forum for Combating Antisemitism.
During an informal celebration at Jerusalem’s Crowne Plaza Hotel, Mr Weisskirchen penned, in his famed telegraphic style, on Global Forum letterpaper, his opposition to the ‘Prague Declaration’ in the spirit of three new ‘DEs’: ‘De-valuation of the victims, De-stortion of history, De-legimitization of the Holocaust. These are the reasons why I oppose the Prague Declaration’ — Gert Weisskirchen
Images courtesy of Dr Clemens Heni of WPK.
Posted in EU, Germany, Gert Weisskirchen, Human Rights, Israel, News & Views, Politics of Memory
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Gert Weisskirchen Puts on Paper, Informally, View of the 2008 Prague Declaration
At an informal meeting of participants in the Global Forum on Combating Antisemitism in Jerusalem this evening, veteran German Social Democratic parliamentarian and human rights champion Professor Gert Weisskirchen put on paper his informal views of the 2008 Prague Declaration:
Posted in Double Genocide: The New Form of Holocaust Revisionism & Denial, EU, Germany, Gert Weisskirchen, News & Views, Politics of Memory
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Holocaust Survivors call on Global Forum to condemn the ‘Prague Declaration’
In a statement issued at the launch in Jerusalem of the 2009 Global Forum for Combating Antisemitism, the Association of Lithuanian Jews called on the Forum ‘to forcefully condemn the Prague Declaration, which seeks to create a false symmetry between Nazi and Soviet crimes, and is an attempt to obfuscate and diminish the Holocaust by various means (including an attempt to redefine genocide)’. The statement describes the Prague Declaration as ‘a prime symptom of a new and dangerous strain of antisemitism that seeks to distort the history of the Holocaust and to confuse perpetrators and victims’.
Posted in Israel, News & Views, Politics of Memory
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Foreign Minister, on eve of Jerusalem visit, explains his view of ‘red and brown’
In a wide-ranging interview (English here), Lithuania’s foreign minister remarked before his visit to Jerusalem that Nazi and Soviet crimes were indeed different, but in this sense: ‘Lithuania suffered from both, but civilized humanity universally condemned the crimes of the Nazis a long time ago, whereas the memory of the Soviet victims was neither morally nor legally assessed for a long time’.
There is no retreat from the implicit equation of the unequatable, no comment on the unique scale of Holocaust genocide which has left Litvak Jewry on the brink of extinction; on his country’s legacy of massive collaboration; on his state agencies’ continuing defamation of elderly Holocaust survivors who joined the anti-Nazi resistance; on his ministry’s investment in the Prague Declaration and other red-brown initiatives; on the attempts to forge a single ‘state truth’ history for Europe. Hopefully, the minister, who has forcefully condemned racist, antisemitic and homophobic outbursts in the media, will now announce removal of the ‘red-equals-brown movement’ from his ministry’s agenda. Text of a public letter addressed to the foreign minister follows. Continue reading
Ronald Lauder, President of World Jewish Congress, Speaks Up in Response to Lithuania’s Justice Minister
The following report today appeared on the website of the World Jewish Congress. The initial DefendingHistory.com report of 2 December 2009 is here.
Ronald Lauder criticizes revisionist theses of Lithuanian justice minister
04 December 2009
![In June 1941, members of the Lithuanian Militia lead Jews to locations outside the city of Kovno. In all, some 10,000 Jews were murdered within the first six weeks following the German invasion. [photo: Yad Vashem]](https://www.worldjewishcongress.org/userfiles/image/091204_focusl.jpg)
Lithuanian Justice Minister Remigijus Šimašius has said his country should answer questions regarding its behavior during World War II with its head held high. Writing in his internet blog, Šimašius dismissed accusations that Lithuania had been an anti-Semitic country and collaborated with the Nazis. “First of all, the fact that many Jews were killed in Lithuania does not in itself mean that Lithuanians were Jew killers. Quite on the contrary: Lithuania was a place where Jews were safe and lived in peace. Until the Nazis came. Had Lithuanians been anti-Semitic, Lithuania would not have become a haven for the Jews, and Vilnius would not have been known as ‘Jerusalem of the North’,” the justice minister argued.
Posted in Collaborators Glorified, Double Genocide: The New Form of Holocaust Revisionism & Denial, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Politics of Memory, Vilnius Mayor Remigijus Šimašius, World Jewish Congress (WJC) and ORT
Tagged Ronald Lauder + Lithuania, World Jewish Congress + Lithuania
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Justice Minister Defies Documented History, Denies Lithuanian Holocaust Collaboration
On his blog, the justice minister of Lithuania, Remigijus Simasius, dismisses the internationally known history of massive (and official and institutional) Lithuanian collaboration with the Nazi annihilation of the country’s Jewish population during the Holocaust. English translation. Delfi summary in Lithuanian. BNS summary in English. He makes no mention of his own prosecutors’ continuing defamation of Holocaust survivors who joined the anti-Nazi resistance, or the international condemnation of his prosecutors’ activities. He does, however, fault the US, Great Britain and the USSR in connection with the Holocaust.
His blog cites his prime minister’s earlier HARDtalk interview with the BBC’s Jonathan Charles on 30 Nov (video here; → Holocaust issues at timecode starting ±18:40; alternate here at ±5:55). The PM effectively let slip the policy of investing in Jewish memorials and projects while trying to (a) equate the Holocaust with Soviet crimes, and (b) downplay local collaboration.
Hostages to an Ill-Begotten Theory
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This essay first appeared in Transitions on Line on 10 October 2008, with the following editor’s note: “Lithuanian authorities in late September closed their two-year investigation into the wartime partisan activities of Yitzhak Arad, a Lithuanian-born Israeli historian and a former head of the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, reportedly on the urging of the European Union and the United States. Prosecutors said there was insufficient evidence to link Arad to possible war crimes committed by Soviet partisans during a 1944 fight with German forces that left many Lithuanian civilians dead. The authorities are still considering whether to put two Lithuanian Jewish women, Fania Brantsovskaya (Brantsovsky) and Rachel Margolis, on the witness stand in connection with the killings.”
It is republished here with Professor Donskis’s permission. For a history of the issue, see our page on the subject of Holocaust survivors defamed by prosecutors.
See more of Professor Donskis’s work in Defending History.
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A disturbing tendency has recently appeared in Lithuania. In the words of the eminent scholar of Yiddish Dovid Katz, this tendency may best be described as the “Holocaust Obfuscation movement.” Its essence lies in subversion of the logic and evidence of the Holocaust, whitewashing or at least selectively reading the history of the Second World War and drastically shifting the roles of victims and evil-doers.
Posted in A 21st Century Campaign Against Lithuanian Holocaust Survivors?, Antisemitism & Bias, Bold Citizens Speak Out, Double Genocide: The New Form of Holocaust Revisionism & Denial, Dr. Rokhl (Rachel) Margolis (1921-2015), Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky (Fania Brancovskaja): 1922-2024, History, Human Rights, Leonidas Donskis, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, Yitzhak Arad
Tagged Donskis + antisemitism in Lithuania, Dovid Katz, Fania Brantsovskaya, Fania Brantsovsky, Holocaust in Lithuania, Jewish partisans in Lithuania, Leonidas Donskis, Rachel Margolis, Transitions on Line, Yitzhak Arad
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Key Diplomats in Vilnius ‘walk in the rain’ with VYI Librarian Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky
At the initiative of Norway’s ambassador to Lithuania HE Steinar Gil, a group of ambassadors and chiefs of mission defied persistent rain to go on a historical walking tour of the Vilna Ghetto, where Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky, 87, librarian of the Vilnius Yiddish Institute, recounted the history of the city’s anti-Nazi resistance. They represented the embassies of Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Japan, Norway, Poland, Portugal and Russia. Britain, Canada and the United States had participated on a previous date.
The walk was preceded by a meeting at the Jewish Community of Lithuania addressed by Norwegian ambassador HE Steinar Gil, JCL chairman Dr Shimon Alperovich, executive director Mr Simon Gurevich, and Professor Dovid Katz of the Vilnius Yiddish Institute. The event is perceived as a meaningful response to the campaign of defamation targeting Jewish veterans of the anti-Nazi resistance (see below at 28 October 2009). Report at: Responses (→ 26 Nov 2009).
Front Page Article Calls for Shutdown of Holocaust Studies
According to a front page report (continued on page 3), in the mass circulation daily Vakaro zinios, headlined: ‘Important News. Jews won’t slander us Anymore’, a shutdown of Holocaust Studies is called for to ‘shut up Jews slandering Lithuanians’.
Specifically, the article, in an antisemitic tone, explains that the Genocide Center will itself now determine which locals participated in the Holocaust. English translation.
For the overall tone at the Genocide Museum, on Vilnius’s central boulevard, see here. Antisemitism and rejection of the internationally known narrative of the Holocaust are closely interlinked in the Baltic region, and to some extent, throughout Eastern Europe.
Posted in Antisemitism & Bias, Media Watch, News & Views
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Erasmus Students invited to ‘Exchange Genocide Project’
European exchange students on the Erasmus program in Lithuania have received this email from the program’s local leadership inviting them to join for free an interactive ‘Exchange Genocide Project’ complete with Russian speaking actors and psychological and physical punishment. Participating Erasmus students are required to sign this confirmation form.
There is no mention of any ‘Exchange Genocide Project’ to commemorate the Holocaust or to visit peacefully any of the 202 mass murder sites in the country.
Erasmus is financed by the European Union.
Posted in Double Genocide: The New Form of Holocaust Revisionism & Denial, EU, Human Rights, News & Views, Politics of Memory, Russian Speakers' Personal Status, Rūta Vanagaitė
Tagged Ruta Vanagaite
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Shimon Peres Attacked for holding Nazi and Soviet crimes to be Different
Leading Baltic news portal Delfi.lt attacks Israel’s president Shimon Peres for differentiating Nazi and Soviet crimes. English translation. Peres’s remarks were distorted (see original; English translation). The Delfi piece includes this graphic:
Daiva Repečkaitė replies.
Double Genocide Industry Produces Triumphant ‘Football Score Card’
One of the novel forms of antisemitism to emerge from the post-Soviet Baltics revels in diminishing Nazism and ‘growing’ Communism (often regarded as a ‘Jewish plot’) in a macabre equation, to produce a model of ‘equality’ for naive westerners and the European Parliament, while at home gloating at perceived successes in actually presenting Communism as ‘worse’. At the root of the project is the wish to obfuscate the Holocaust and the dismal Baltic record of collaboration, while seeking to cast aspersions on the victims and the few survivors by tacitly encouraging the canard ‘All Jews are Communists’. This graphic, a less-than-mature red-brown ‘scorecard’ (with the foregone result of the ‘game’ provided: Communism 1, Nazism 0), was offered up yet again by the mainstream news portal Delfi.lt, in the course of an attack on President Shimon Peres of Israel for having expressed his view that Nazism and Communism are not the same (English translation of the Delfi.lt article here). In any case, President Peres’s actual remarks in Lietuvos rytas (English here) were taken out of context and distorted.
Posted in Antisemitism & Bias, Double Genocide: The New Form of Holocaust Revisionism & Denial, News & Views, Politics of Memory
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Key Western Embassies Avoid Lukša Event at Lithuanian Parliament
The Lithuanian parliament (Seimas) will host a reception on 12 November in honor of the appearance of the English translation of the book of memoirs by Juozas Lukša-Daumantas, a postwar hero of the ‘Forest Brothers’ resistance movement against Soviet occupation. There is lively argument among scholars about whether Lukša is or is not the person on an infamous photograph of LAF butchers at the Lietukis Garage. But there is no dispute that he was an active member of the LAF and that he never expressed a word of regret about the LAF’s principal ‘accomplishment’: premeditated announcement, launch and intense participation in the actual butchery of Lithuanian Jewry (leaflet extracts) starting on 23 June 1941, committing mass murder in dozens of locations before arrival of the first German forces and their setting up of their administration.
The diplomatic corps in Vilnius was invited to the 12 November reception (invitation here). The ambassadors of France, Germany, Ireland, Norway, and others directly informed Defending History that they would not attend.
Posted in Collaborators Glorified, Debates on Juozas Lukša, It Pays to Defend History: Success Over the Years..., Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, ministries, News & Views
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