September 23rd Commemorations

Painfully, Yad Vashem Heads for Vilnius Event, Again ‘Legitimizing’ the ‘Red-Brown Commission’, an Engine of Holocaust Revisionism



OPINION | RED-BROWN COMMISSION (SECTION) | DOUBLE GENOCIDE | LITVAK AFFAIRS | LITHUANIA | YAD VASHEM & LITHUANIA  | ISRAEL ISSUES (SECTION)

Prof. Dina Porat of Yad Vashem will chair the Vilnius event on the Vilna Ghetto this Wednesday 20 Sept. featuring (among others) Ronaldas Račinskas and other officials of the state-funded “Red-Brown Commission” — one of Europe’s major engines of Double Genocide revisionism and the Prague Declaration.

VILNIUS—As long as Lithuanian Holocaust survivors were alive, they protested with their last breath against the motives and agenda of the Lithuanian government financed Red-Brown Commission (officially known, à la Orwell, as the “International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupational Regimes of Lithuania” or ICECNSORL). Readers can visit a page documenting these protests from 1998 onward, reports of the painful episodes and sagas over the decades, and perhaps most painfully, the heartfelt begging by the last survivors, asking Yad Vashem to resist Foreign Ministry pressure and have nothing to do with the commission. Perhaps the best known document is the September 2012 letter to Yad Vashem by the late Joseph Melamed, legendary chairperson of the Association of Lithuanian Jews in Israel, the world’s leading and last organization of Lithuanian Holocaust survivors.

UPDATE OF 22 SEPT 2023:

See now Yad Vashem chairman Dani Dayan’s dramatic and historic speech at the Lithuanian Parliament that turns a new leaf in the pained Lithuanian chapter

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Posted in "Red-Brown Commission", Double Genocide, Israel, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Mažvydas National Library (Issues Arising), News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, September 23rd Commemorations, Yad Vashem and Lithuania | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Painfully, Yad Vashem Heads for Vilnius Event, Again ‘Legitimizing’ the ‘Red-Brown Commission’, an Engine of Holocaust Revisionism

Yet Again, Naive Foreigners in Awe of Annual PR Show by ‘Red-Brown Commission’ (and its Director who Supports ‘War Crime Investigations’ of Holocaust Survivors)



OPINION  |  RED-BROWN COMMISSION  |  MR. RAČINSKAS ON THE HOLOCAUST  |  LITHUANIA  |  DOUBLE GENOCIDE

VILNIUS—With nearly all local Holocaust Survivors now gone, or effectively out of public circulation, Lithuania’s “Red-Brown Commission,” a major European engine for the downgrade of the Holocaust via far-right “Double Genocide” history revisionism  is again in the forefront of PR efforts to bowl over naive foreign visitors and delegations to this city, particularly on September 23rd each year, with “moving Holocaust elegies.” For Lithuanian Holocaust survivors, the very choice of Sept. 23 (day of the 1943 liquidation of the Vilna Ghetto by the Germans, two years after the murder of the majority of Lithuanian Jews in hundreds of towns across the land) was seen as a decoy. The day each of them had etched in the heart in perpetuity was June 23rd, when in 1941, violence against Jews broke out in hundreds of locations, with murder documented in around forty — before the first German forces arrived or managed to set up their authority. It was the day when six hundred years of peaceful, harmonious coexistence turned overnight, under Hitlerist propaganda, to dehumanization, humiliation, plunder, rape, injury and murder. To this day, an industrial grade revisionist industry continues to obfuscate or outright deny the history of the First Week (i.e. the last week of June 1941). Indeed, June 23rd is  celebrated by far-right government historians each year as the date of a supposed “uprising” against the Soviets  by the white-armbanded Jew killers who did not “rebel” until the Soviets fled in disarray from Hitler’s invasion, when they began to murder Jewish neighbors across the land unleashing the Lithuanian Holocaust, in which 96.4% of Lithuanian Jewry perished. In 2020, Dr. Arunas Bubnys, the chief historian of the second “Holocaust entity financed by the state,” the Genocide Center, celebrated  the “holiday ” alongside banners of two major Holocaust collaborators. He was rewarded a year later with directorship of the Center.

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Posted in "Red-Brown Commission", Double Games, Double Genocide, Events, Holocaust Policies of Mr. Ronaldas Račinskas and the State-Sponsored "International Commission" (ICECNSORL), Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Media Watch, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, September 23rd Commemorations | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Yet Again, Naive Foreigners in Awe of Annual PR Show by ‘Red-Brown Commission’ (and its Director who Supports ‘War Crime Investigations’ of Holocaust Survivors)

Honoring Holocaust Victims One Day, and Two Days Later — Perpetrators



COLLABORATORS GLORIFIED  |  JUOZAS LUKŠA DEBATES

VILNIUS—Two days before tomorrow’s government-sponsored international “academic” conference (on September 10) that glorifies alleged 1941 Holocaust perpetrator Juozas Lukša (without a single paper devoted to the issue of his Kaunas 1941 Holocaust participation), the foreign minister led a high-end Holocaust remembrance ceremony (yesterday, 8 Sept.) bewailing the calamity of the Holocaust and its scale in Lithuania. That ceremony dated the onset of the Lithuanian Holocaust to the first week of September, when the Nazis set up the Vilna Ghetto, and others.

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Posted in American Jewish Committee (AJC) in Lithuania, Collaborators Glorified, Debates on Juozas Lukša, Double Games, History, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Politics of Memory, September 23rd Commemorations | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Honoring Holocaust Victims One Day, and Two Days Later — Perpetrators

Coverage of Sept. 23 Events Focused on Saving Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery



OPINION  |  HUMAN RIGHTS  |  CEMETERIES & MASS GRAVES  |  OLD VILNA JEWISH CEMETERY AT PIRAMÓNT  |  OPPOSITION TO CONVENTION CENTER PROJECT  | INTERNATIONAL PETITION  |  USCPAHA | CPJCE  |  ADMAS KODESH

Invitations to the Event Attracted Two Hundred People from Seven Countries

The program of speakers and events.  Facebook report with photos.  Text of Dr. Andrius Kulikauskas’s keynote speech. Julius Norwilla’s photo gallery.

Lithuanian media: Main  LRT evening news  (from timecode 4:56).  15min.lt (report and photo gallery).  Lithuanian text of Dr. Kulikauskas’s keynote address published in Bernardinai.ltEuropean Foundation for Human Rights (Lithuanian offices).

Lithuanian Polish language media: TVP WilnoWilnoteka.lt.

Jewish and international media: HamevaserKikar.

MEANWHILE…

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Posted in Cemeteries and Mass Graves, CPJCE (London), Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Media Watch, News & Views, Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery at Piramónt (in Šnipiškės / Shnípishok), September 23rd Commemorations | Comments Off on Coverage of Sept. 23 Events Focused on Saving Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery

Schedule of September 23rd 2019 Events on Lithuania’s Holocaust Day, in Plea for Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery



VILNIUS—The following is the schedule for today’s events organized by Mr. Dov-Ber and Mrs. Chaya Fried of New York City in cooperation with the Vilnius Committee for Preservation of the Piramónt Jewish Cemetery (chaired by Julius Norwilla) and the European Foundation for Human Rights (represented by attorney Evelina Dobrowolska). The first event, at twilight, is on a ridge above the cemetery, moderated by Rabbi Yehuda Genut. The second, more formal, seminar is at the nearby Marriott Hotel, moderated by Mrs. Chaya Fried.

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Posted in Cemeteries and Mass Graves, Human Rights, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery at Piramónt (in Šnipiškės / Shnípishok), September 23rd Commemorations | Comments Off on Schedule of September 23rd 2019 Events on Lithuania’s Holocaust Day, in Plea for Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery

This Year’s Sept. 23 Events Remembering Holocaust to Include Pleas for the Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery at Piramónt



Monday September 23 in Vilnius

Day of Prayer and  Respectful Challenge to Spare Old Jewish Cemetery at Piramónt (Šnipiškės) from Plans to Site a Convention Center in its Heart

September 23rd is Lithuania’s Holocaust Commemoration Day. It is because of the Holocaust that there are almost no local descendants of the many thousands of buried there to stand up for the dignity and integrity of ancestors’ graves. This is a matter of human and minority rights: it would not be happening to a five-hundred year old cemetery of the majority population. It would not happen in the west of the European Union, and must not happen in its east, whose peoples deserve the same standards of equal rights and human dignity. Cheering at conventions, drinking at bars and flushing toilets surrounded on all four sides by extant graves is not human dignity. Vilnius deserves better for the years and generations to come.

All welcome! Major Litvak rabbis and scholars will be flying in for the one-day event among them Rabbi Asher Arielli, Rabbi Dovid Feinstein, Rabbi Orin Reich, and Rabbi Yaakov Shapira . Local speakers include Vilnius Jewish Community head Simon Gurevich and Lithuanian philosopher Dr. Andrius Kulikauskas. Coordinated by Julius Norwilla, chair of the Vilnius Committee for the Old Jewish Cemetery at Piramónt, in cooperation with the European Foundation for Human Rights, whose appeal before the Vilnius courts is now supported by 235 affidavits, including the Elyashiv, Finkel, Levine, Segal, Shternbruch & Soloveitchik families.  Established by Dov-Ber and Chaya Fried.Continue reading

Posted in Cemeteries and Mass Graves, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery at Piramónt (in Šnipiškės / Shnípishok), Opinion, Politics of Memory, September 23rd Commemorations | Comments Off on This Year’s Sept. 23 Events Remembering Holocaust to Include Pleas for the Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery at Piramónt

Yivo’s Newest One-Sided “Lithuanian-Jewish Event” on Thursday 5 Sept.



OPINION  |  YIVO MANIPULATED?  |  JEWISH STUDIES AS COVER  | YIDDISH AFFAIRS

NEW YORK—The Yivo Institute for Jewish Research, founded in Vilna (then Wilno, Poland) in 1925 as the world’s premier Yiddish-in-Yiddish academic institute, has, to the consternation of many of its life-long supporters and participating scholars, in recent years been (temporarily, its long-time supporters hope) “hijacked” by a few elite circles in the Lithuanian government who are determined to exploit Judaic, and especially the now-weak branch of Yiddish studies as a tool to cover for policies of rewriting the history of the Holocaust in a far-right East European nationalist spirit, as well as state programs of glorification of alleged Holocaust collaborators. The best known cry of protest came  several years ago from Vilna-born Holocaust survivor and lifelong resident, Prof. Pinchos Fridberg.

וואָס וואָלטן טאַקע טראַכטן מאַקס ווײַנרײַך, זלמן רייזען און דינה אַבראַמאָוויטש וועגן די נײַע צילן פון ניו⸗יאָרקער ייוואָ?

Even as ever more circles in today’s free, democratic, and delightful Lithuania have come to understand the Jewish, Litvak and Holocaust issues in a spirit of friendship and partnership, New York’s Yivo continues to function as a political arm of the Holocaust revisionists’ “International Commission on the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupational Regimes in Lithuania” (Yivo’s director even joined the commission), and a small “Jewish manipulation unit” in the Foreign Ministry, neither of which reflect so much of what is really going on. For a month now, the headline of Defending History has honored Vilnius’s mayor for boldly taking down two long-standing, and contemptible, public space memorials for Holocaust collaborators.

Still, yet again, Yivo has opted to exclude all other voices, while enabling the ongoing shenanigans of nationalist manipulation which recently resulted in the NY Yivo director’s being awarded the Cross for the Knight of the Order  for Merits to Lithuaniafrom the Lithuanian government, even as Holocaust survivors and their families continue to be betrayed in a way that would make Yivo’s founders twist in their graves.

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Posted in "Jewish" Events as Cover?, American Jewish Committee (AJC) in Lithuania, Dr. Rokhl (Rachel) Margolis (1921-2015), Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, September 23rd Commemorations, United States, Yivo Manipulated? | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Yivo’s Newest One-Sided “Lithuanian-Jewish Event” on Thursday 5 Sept.

Is Yad Vashem Legitimizing Vilnius “Genocide Center”?



OPINION  |  YAD VASHEM MANIPULATED  |  GENOCIDE CENTER

 Under Pressure of Israeli Foreign Ministry?

Vilnius Genocide Center: “Legitimized” by 19 Nov. Yad Vashem Conference in Jerusalem?

Its chief historian Dr. A. Bubnys is a major speaker; See DH review of his book on the Vilna Ghetto and report on Jewish community’s response to his publication on the Shavl (Šiauliai) Ghetto. Are pliant “Jewish academics” being flown in and wheeled out to provide cover for the newest chapters in Holocaust revisionism? These include East European state glorification of collaborators and denial of the outbreak of mass violence by the LAF and other “nationalist heroes” against Jewish neighbors before the onset of German administration in the last week of June 1941.

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Posted in Collaborators Glorified, Dr. Arūnas Bubnys and State Holocaust Revisionism in Lithuania, Dr. Rokhl (Rachel) Margolis (1921-2015), Events, Genocide Center (Vilnius), History, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, September 23rd Commemorations, Yad Vashem and Lithuania | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Is Yad Vashem Legitimizing Vilnius “Genocide Center”?

Sept. 23rd Ponár Memorial and Pope Francis’s Visit to Vilna Ghetto Memorial



OPINION  |  EVENTS  |  CHRISTIAN-JEWISH RELATIONS  |  HOLOCAUST MEMORIALS  |  VILNIUS JEWISH LIFE

IMAGE OF THE DAY: Elected chairperson of the Vilnius Jewish Community, Simon Gurevich, was not allowed past the security barrier, barring him from the Pope’s event to commemorate the Vilna Ghetto. At the earlier event at Ponár, he was not allowed to deliver his prepared remarks.

VILNIUS—The two major “September 23rd” events today in Vilnius were the annual commemoration ceremony at the mass murder site Ponár in the forest outside the city, and, later in the afternoon, Pope Francis’s visit to the small monument, its 1990s Yiddish letters faded beyond legibility, commemorating the Vilna Ghetto in an Old Town square opposite the city’s beloved Jewish Cultural and Information Center (JCIC). [See also Andrius Kulikauskas’s appeal to the Pope on the eve of his visit in connection with his visit to Lukiškės Square in central Vilnius.]

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Posted in A Stolen Election and a Small Jewish Community's Protest, Christian-Jewish Issues, Commemorations for Destroyed Communities, Events, Foreign Ministries: Holocaust Politics Abuse?, Israel, Lithuania, Lithuania's Jewish Community Issues, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Politics of Memory, September 23rd Commemorations, Simon Gurevich (Simonas Gurevičius), Vilnius Mayor Remigijus Šimašius | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Sept. 23rd Ponár Memorial and Pope Francis’s Visit to Vilna Ghetto Memorial

September 23rd Events in the Vilnius Region



DEFENDING HISTORY WAS THERE

Annual Sept. 23 Official Commemoration Ceremony at the Ponár (Paneriai) Mass Murder Site Outside Vilnius, Lithuania

Historic Breakthrough as Lithuanian Jewish Community’s Faina Kukliansky Finally Calls for Removal of Street Names and Memorials for Holocaust Collaborators, Boldly Citing Juozas KrikštaponisJonas Noreika, and Kazys Škirpa; Sharp Contrast with Last Year’s Failed Event

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Posted in Cemeteries and Mass Graves, Commemorations for Destroyed Communities, Events, Israel, Lithuania, Lithuania's Jewish Community Issues, Litvak Affairs, Museums, News & Views, Politics of Memory, Ponár (Ponary, Paneriai), September 23rd Commemorations | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on September 23rd Events in the Vilnius Region

Run-Up to Lithuania’s Sept. 23rd 2016 Holocaust Commemoration Day



Events in the Week of Lithuania’s Official September 23rd Holocaust Commemoration Day

Vilnius mayor  — and nation’s president and prime minister — face a stark choice on whether to speak out with moral clarity on painful issues of city-center street names and plaques honoring Holocaust collaborators, and the desecration of the country’s oldest Jewish cemetery by a new congress center, prior to this year’s series of official gala Vilna Ghetto commemoration events, 20-28 September 2016

OUR TAKE ON THE NEW HEBREW-YIDDISH STREET SIGN IN THE OLD JEWISH QUARTER

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Posted in Cemeteries and Mass Graves, Commemorations for Destroyed Communities, Events, Israel, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Politics of Memory, September 23rd Commemorations | Comments Off on Run-Up to Lithuania’s Sept. 23rd 2016 Holocaust Commemoration Day

August and September 2016 Memorials for Destroyed Jewish Communities



Summer and Fall 2016: 75th Anniversary

of the Nazis’ annihilation, with vast local collaboration, of Lithuania’s Jews in the towns, villages, provinces; implementation of ghettoization and mass murder in the cities.

Perhaps among the simplest, most minimalist measures of a municipality’s sincerity (beyond PR bonanzas, photo-ops and legitimizations via useful foreigners): (a) Modest town-center information board on the origins, history, culture, contributions and (true) fate of the town’s Jewish citizens; (b) Rapid removal of any local shrines, street names, museum tributes etc. to the local collaborators and murderers. “You just can’t make heroes out of the killers and expect to cover it up with some annual PR event for the foreigners.”

Language and respect for the victims: In addition to Lithuanian and English, will new memorial texts (including those at forest mass graves and old cemeteries) continue to include Yiddish, the language of 100% of the murdered Jews in all these towns? For many years, Lithuania has had a uniquely admirable record in this regard.

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Posted in Birzh (Biržai ), Commemorations for Destroyed Communities, Events, History, Human Rights, Lithuania, Lithuania's Jewish Community Issues, Litvak Affairs, Malát (Molėtai), Media Watch, News & Views, Politics of Memory, Šeduva (Sheduva, Shádeve, Shádov) and its "Museum of the Lost Shtetl", September 23rd Commemorations | Comments Off on August and September 2016 Memorials for Destroyed Jewish Communities

On the Eve of the 30 Sept. 2015 “Conference on Antisemitism and Radicalism” in Vilnius



From our front page of 29 September 2015:

Wednesday’s Conference in Vilnius on Antisemitism and Radicalism

Will it confront issues or be another de-facto government PR exercise?

Will the conference discuss neo-Nazi marches allowed to take over the center of Kaunas each February 16th and the center of Vilnius each March 11th? Shrines, plaques and street names that honor Holocaust collaborators? Attacks on Holocaust survivors by state commissions? Defamation of Jewish partisan veterans? Absence of state apologies to defamed Jewish partisan heroes? Prosecutorial persecution of Lithuanian Holocaust truth-tellers and other violations of freedom of speech? Whether neo-Nazi PR master “Zeppelinus” is still a high Economy Ministry official? The 2010 legalization of swastikas? 2010 criminalization of Western views of World War II? 2015 project to build a $25,000,000 convention center in the heart of Vilnius’s old Jewish cemetery? A Protestant pastor spoke out; so did Litvak rabbis from around the world, a Holocaust survivor, and the top expert on the cemetery’s history. But when the chief rabbi of 11 years supported the international consensus, he was fired for his opinion. His views on antisemitism in Lithuania could have enlightened this conference — but he was not invited to speak.

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Posted in Antisemitism & Bias, Events, Human Rights, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, September 23rd Commemorations | Comments Off on On the Eve of the 30 Sept. 2015 “Conference on Antisemitism and Radicalism” in Vilnius

Israel Faced Some Delicate Post-Holocaust Issues During Lithuanian PM’s September Visit



Efraim Zuroff asked in the Jerusalem Post that the Baltic state’s campaign to revise Holocaust history — and its plans to plonk a convention center in the middle of Vilna’s old Jewish cemetery — be on the table; Zuroff’s post-visit article in i24

INTERNATIONAL OPPOSITION TO “CONVENTION CENTER IN THE JEWISH CEMETERY”

PAPER TRAIL

ISRAEL PAGE

ISRAEL SECTION

7 SOLUTIONS

AFTER MEETING NETANYAHU, PRIME MINISTER BUTKEVICIUS GLOATED TO MEDIA THAT ISRAEL DOESN’T OBJECT TO THE “GRAVEYARD CONVENTION CENTER” DESPITE INTERNATIONAL OPPOSITION; JTA REPORT; IN THE JERUSALEM POST

CAMPAIGN AGAINST JEWISH PARTISANS NOT EVEN MENTIONED? Does Israel betray its own citizens by not asking apologies for the World War II heroes Yitzhak Arad, (the late) Rachel Margolis and  Joseph Melamed? Arad and Melamed are heroes of Israel’s 1948 war of independence.  Will there now be a public apology on the prosecutors’ page that still defames him [as PDF]  and from the “Human Rights Association”? Apologies to Israeli citizens Rachel Margolis and Joseph Melamed? The 2009 Leivick House (Tel Aviv) speech of the late Ambassador Chen Ivri Apter. What does Dr. Arad  think?

BUT PM DECRIED “DOUBLE GENOCIDE” IN PUBLIC (JP REPORT). HE WILL HOPEFULLY FOLLOW UP AT HOME ON STREET NAMES AND PUBLIC HONORS FOR HOLOCAUST PERPETRATORS [CURRENT DEBATE]; OVERDUE APOLOGIES TO JEWISH PARTISANS; RAPID REFORM OR ABOLITION OF GENOCIDE CENTER AND RED-BROWN COMMISSION — AND REPUDIATION OF THE PRAGUE DECLARATION.  NEO-NAZI PARADES ON INDEPENDENCE DAYS?

RECENT MEDIA:  Slate.  The Forward.  Jerusalem Post.  JTA.  Times of Israel.

Posted in Cemeteries and Mass Graves, Dr. Rokhl (Rachel) Margolis (1921-2015), Israel, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery at Piramónt (in Šnipiškės / Shnípishok), Politics of Memory, September 23rd Commemorations | Comments Off on Israel Faced Some Delicate Post-Holocaust Issues During Lithuanian PM’s September Visit

Lithuanian Translation of the 25 September 2012 Letter from Congressmen Sherman, Wachman, Berman to the Prime Minister of Lithuania


The following is a translation into Lithuanian of the letter signed by US congressmen Brad Sherman, Henry Wachman and Howard Berman on 25 September 2012. English original is here. Published Russian translation. Both translations were provided by Jacob Piliansky (Vilnius).



  • JAV Kongresas
  • Vašingtonas
  • Rugsėjo 25, 2012

 

Gerbiamasis, Ministre Pirmininke Kubiliau

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Posted in Collaborators Glorified, Lithuania, News & Views, Politics of Memory, September 23rd Commemorations, United States | Comments Off on Lithuanian Translation of the 25 September 2012 Letter from Congressmen Sherman, Wachman, Berman to the Prime Minister of Lithuania

Faina Kukliansky’s Speech at Ponár (Paneriai) on 23 September 2011



O P I N I O N

by Faina Kukliansky

The following is the approved text of the speech by Faina Kukliansky at the September 23rd commemoration ceremony at Ponár (Paneriai), the mass murder site near Vilnius where some 70,000 Jews from the city and its surrounding areas, and around 30,000 non-Jews, were murdered by the Nazis and their local partners. A prominent attorney and constitutional specialist, Kukliansky is chairperson of the Vilnius Jewish Community and deputy chairperson of the Jewish Community of Lithuania. The text was translated from the Lithuanian by Geoff Vasil and approved by the author.


In 1994 September 23rd was declared the day of commemoration for Lithuanian Jewish genocide victims, dedicated to honoring the victims. The Vilna Ghetto was liquidated on 23 September 1943 when the last surviving Jewish residents of the Lithuanian capital were murdered or sent to concentration camps abroad.

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Posted in Commemorations for Destroyed Communities, Faina Kukliansky, Opinion, Ponár (Ponary, Paneriai), September 23rd Commemorations | Comments Off on Faina Kukliansky’s Speech at Ponár (Paneriai) on 23 September 2011

Yivo: Rolling Coverage to 23 September 2011


Lithuanian Foreign Ministry Triumphantly Announces Its Yivo Coup — A Capitulation on ‘(Looted) Books and (Hijacked) Brand’ Sought for Two Decades — on 23 September, Day of Commemoration for the Vilna Ghetto

But confusion reigns after Yivo director tells Jewish press in New York that surrender of books and brand is not yet final

DETAILS HERE

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Posted in "Jewish" Events as Cover?, News & Views, September 23rd Commemorations, United States, Yiddish Affairs, Yivo Manipulated? | Tagged | Comments Off on Yivo: Rolling Coverage to 23 September 2011

Holocaust Survivors from Lithuania Protest Yivo’s Decision to Honor the Foreign Minister of Lithuania at Vilna Ghetto Commemoration


The Association of Lithuanian Jews in Israel, one of the world’s last active organizations of Holocaust survivors from Lithuania, today released to the media (by fax) its letter of protest to the executive director of the Yivo Institute for Jewish Research concerning Yivo’s recent decision to have the Lithuanian foreign minister as ‘guest of honor’ at its 22 September event to commemorate the Vilna Ghetto. The association’s letter notes that its members are ‘nearly all Holocaust survivors ourselves’.

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Posted in "Jewish" Events as Cover?, Events, Lithuania, News & Views, September 23rd Commemorations, United States, Yivo Manipulated? | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Holocaust Survivors from Lithuania Protest Yivo’s Decision to Honor the Foreign Minister of Lithuania at Vilna Ghetto Commemoration

Et tu, Yivo? Holocaust Survivors Jolted by Plan for Lithuanian Foreign Minister to be ‘Guest of Honor’ at Vilna Ghetto Commemoration



O P I N I O N

by Dovid Katz

When you have loved an institution all your life — and written over decades about its impact on the history of ideas — it becomes a responsibility, even when painful, to try to dissuade it from making a serious error that would put in jeopardy its integrity.

The Lithuanian foreign minister, who has to date not apologized publicly for his widely reported antisemitic outburst in October 2010, has been named by the Yivo Institute for Jewish Research as its ‘guest of honor’ at a concert on 22 September 2011. The remnant Jewish community of Lithuania is small and fragile. Nevertheless it responded robustly, less than a year ago, to the foreign minister’s comments and proceeded to publish its response in English, Lithuanian, Russian and Yiddish.

Yivo’s website enumerates the joint sponsorship for the 22 September 2011 event by ‘the Embassy Series in cooperation with the Lithuanian Consulate and the Lithuanian Delegation to the United Nations’. The event is being held to commemorate the anniversary of the liquidation of the Vilna Ghetto on 23 September 1943.

Perpetrators glorified

In 2011 — to mark the 70th anniversary of Hitler’s invasion, and  to the chagrin of Holocaust survivors internationally — the Lithuanian government has invested in a series of events honoring the local perpetrators who began to kill Jewish neighbors in dozens of towns before the Germans even arrived (a reading list on the history is available here). The ‘logic’ has been that they were actually rebelling against Soviet rule, though it is not disputed by historians that the Soviets were obviously fleeing the Nazi invasion.

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Posted in "Jewish" Events as Cover?, A 21st Century Campaign Against Lithuanian Holocaust Survivors?, Dovid Katz, Dr. Rokhl (Rachel) Margolis (1921-2015), Events, Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky (Fania Brancovskaja): 1922-2024, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Opinion, September 23rd Commemorations, United Nations, United States, Yiddish Affairs, Yivo Manipulated? | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Et tu, Yivo? Holocaust Survivors Jolted by Plan for Lithuanian Foreign Minister to be ‘Guest of Honor’ at Vilna Ghetto Commemoration