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BERLIN—The German Bundestag’s 16 December 2025 record of questions-and-answers on the remnants of the last Jewish partisan fort in Lithuania, is now online on the German parliamentary website and available as separate PDF. Images of the individual pages:
NOTE: Please come visit and look through DefendingHistory.com (recent reports here). Ordering of the list below is not in order of importance. Weighting of specific issues is in the view of the beholder. For some historic perspective covering recent decades, see our older page on “Seven Solutions,” the original version of which was completed in partnership with the late Dr. Shimon Alperovich (1928-2014) in his final years as elected head of the Lithuanian Jewish Community.
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VILNIUS—The following is the text of Dovid Katz’s post on Facebook today in response to the call by 53 signatories of Lithuania’s declaration of independence for proceeding with a convention center in the heart of the Old Vilna Jewish cemetery:
https://defendinghistory.com/53-signatories-of-lithuanias-declaration-of-independence-call-on-president-and-pm-to-proceed-with-a-national-conference-center-surrounded-by-thousands-of-jewish-graves/122914
As Jewish people here in Vilnius, and around the world, were preparing for the first Passover seyder last week, certain powerful forces here arranged for a demand by 53 signatories of Lithuania’s declaration of independence to the president and prime minister to ignore protests from around the world and proceed with the erection of a national convention center in the heart of the Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery, where many thousands still lie buried, including some of the major Litvak scholars of the last half-millennium.
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VILNIUS—Lithuanian media (including Lrt.lt and Alfa.lt) reported today that 53 signatories of Lithuania’s 1990 declaration of independence have signed a petition addressed to the nation’s president and prime minister calling on them to proceed rapidly with renovation of an old Soviet ruin in the heart of the Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery at Piramónt (in Shnipishok, today’s Šnipiškės district). They demand preservation of the hated Soviet ruin to commemoration of national Lithuanian heroes of 1990 and 1991 whose universally acclaimed deeds and fate have no connection to this site — where ground radar has shown that thousands of Jewish graves lie undisturbed all around the hated Soviet relic. There is no mention of this, in other words that it is still a cemetery by anyone’s definition. There is however a “concession” that outside the building there would be some memorial to the “former” Jewish cemetery.
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As a member of the very small religiously observant (Orthodox) Jewish community of Vilnius, and as someone born here in Vilnius, I at times feel it important to speak out publicly on current issues of Jewish life. I am writing this open letter first and foremost to express my public question as to whether a shameful document very widely circulated for several months now, purporting to come from the office of the official Head of the “Vilnius Jewish Religious Community” was indeed written by or approved by the personage whose name appears on top: Mr. Shmuel Yatom (whom I recall previously using the spelling Yusem), the official head of this “Vilnius Religious Jewish Community” that is financed by the restitution-fueled official so-called “Jewish (Litvak) Community of Lithuania” which has done so much damage to genuine Jewish life here in Vilnius, not least by dismantling its longtime democratic structure.
Could this libelous screed really have originated from the office of Mr. Yatom (Yusem), official head of the “religious community”?
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Professor Sid Leiman, the Distinguished Professor of Jewish History and Literature at Touro University’s Graduate School of Jewish Studies, reacted today to Rabbi Sholom Ber Krinsky’s declaration on the fate of the Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery in the following letter to the editor. See also Prof. Leiman’s earlier publications in Defending History.
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Superb declaration by Vilnius’s devoted Rabbi, Rabbi Sholom Ber Krinsky, of why Vilna’s Old Jewish Cemetery needs to be preserved and restored, and not buried under a Sports Stadium, or a Convention Center, or a Museum of any kind — whether Lithuanian or Jewish.
March 11, 2026
Thirty-six years ago today, Lithuania captured the world’s attention. In the face of the Soviet Union—an empire that former U.S. President Ronald Reagan famously called the “evil empire” for its ruthless disregard for morality and human dignity—the people of this small nation chose courage over fear, leading to the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Vilnius’s Rabbi Sholom Ber Krinsky, the city’s only resident rabbi for 32 years
In January 1991, unarmed citizens stood before Soviet tanks in the center of Vilnius. Some gave their lives for freedom, facing unimaginable danger for the cause of dignity and self-determination. They did not know how the story would end—but they knew they could no longer live under the degrading brutality and soulless power of the Soviet system. They stood up—and they prevailed.
History has shown again and again that empires ultimately collapse when they lose their moral and spiritual compass. When conscience disappears, even the largest armies and the most formidable arsenals eventually become irrelevant.
Today, Lithuania stands proud as a democratic, forward-looking European nation. Yet it now faces a profound moral question: how should it treat the historic Šnipiškės Jewish Cemetery, a sacred site scarred by the callousness of the Soviet regime?
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“Pakelk galva pakelk galva! Paupių piliečiai”
Emigrating from Czarist Vilna to Petticoat Lane – escaping pogroms to reside near Jack the Ripper
From the Ripper to the high seas, heading for the Land Downunder
Returning to Lita – a vicarious journey of ancestral discovery and historical revelation
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see also: BOOKS SECTION
For many years, I have followed with deep concern the situation of the Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery at Piramont (Shnípishok, today’s Šnipiškės), located beneath all around the ruin of the Soviet-era Sports Palace. The site, historically known as the major Jewish cemetery in the lands of the Grad Duchy of Lithuania, remains a place of great religious and cultural significance for the Jewish people and for the history of Vilnius itself. Last summer’s announcement confirming intentions to turn it into a national conference center is alarming to good-willed Jews and non-Jews alike. The feelings were reinforced by last week’s event promoting the desecration, an event for some reason held at Lithuania’s National Academy of Sciences.
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UPDATES
Top: The “convention center in the Jewish cemetery” project slated for approval by the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences on Jan. 14th includes an annex (right of image) built right on top of Jewish graves going back half a millennium. Bottom: Alternative narrative of this choice of venue for a new national convention center.
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Introduction (in Yiddish, Lithuanian, and English) to the exhibit honoring Yivo’s centennial at Vilnius’s Jewish Cultural and Information Center in the heart of the city’s Old Town
It is heartwarming to see the widespread celebration of Yivo’s centenary this year, which is ipso facto a celebration of sophisticated Yiddish language culture in all its many branches. May the year’s events lead to ever more inspiring projects, particularly those that in the spirit of the Vilna Yivo will be carried out in Yiddish, strengthening living Yiddish as a vibrant means of communication, including the higher registers of scholarship and literature, for the generations to come, in accordance with Yivo’s raison d’etre. Although a researcher and teacher with a lifelong affiliation with Yivo and all that it means, I fully, to be honest, expected — as a critic of the present Yivo leadership’s participation in Holocaust obfuscation projects by a certain powerful establishment in Lithuania — to be excluded (not informed, not invited to submit a paper topic) by the recent Yivo conference in Vilnius and its eminent local partners.
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On July 1944, Convoy 77 left the internment camp of Drancy in France, three weeks before the liberation of Paris. The destination was Auschwitz-Birkenau. Eight Litvaks living in France were deported, of whom only one survived the war. The association of the deportees of Convoy 77 would receive the sponsorship of the French Presidency which commissioned schools in France and abroad to research and reconstruct their lives in France and their last days. The project was to “put adolescents in charge not of a sepulchral memory but of the reconstitution of life paths more than death paths.”
The project was initiated by a class at the French Lyceum in Vilnius before the Covid-19 epidemic, under the direction of Professor Yvan Leclère, author of a book, Soviet Hegemony. These enthusiastic students began a search on the internet spanning several continents, lasting several years, to piece together why and how these eight Lithuanian Jews had gone to France, how they had lived there and how they came to become ensnared by the Nazis, and finally, sent to their death in Auschwitz. This book can be read as a journal — at times a thriller — that details, sometimes on a daily basis, what progress had been reached in discovering the whereabouts of the eight Lithuanian Jews and also of members of their families who had escaped capture by the Nazis or had been living abroad — and out of danger — at the time these eight were caught.
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“View from Vilnius’s Jewish restaurant”
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VILNIUS—The following is a transcript (in English translation) of an excerpt from the October 15, 2025 interview with Lithuania’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Kęstutis Budrys (Social Democratic Party) on one of the most popular Lithuanian news sites, 15min, that appeared under the title “Kęstutis Budrys’ Interview with 15min: on Libel against Tsikhanouskaya and the Stain of Antisemitism.”
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Human feelings are now as candles without wick burning from inside.
(from a poem by Avrom Sutzkever, a tribute to Yiddish teacher Yankev Gershtein who perished in the Vilna Ghetto on September 27, 1942 (quote from Rudashevski’s Diary)
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Professor emeritus Saulius Sužiedėlis of Millersville University of Pennsylvania begins this major new book by characterizing its long and productive journey. “This study is the result of years of interaction with historians, journalists, and writers from Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, the United States, Poland, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Israel. Inspiration and encouragement emerged from discussions among the eleven-member Sub-Commission on Nazi Crimes, part of the Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes in Lithuania” (p. vii). Sužiedėlis’s opus on the Jews in Lithuania and their almost complete disappearance during the war years is a meticulously researched, coherently chronicled and impressively documented opus, tackling many themes, issues and problems with a staggering abundance of facts, figures, quotes, opinions, and anecdotes. Chunks of it read almost like an autopsy report on places and massacres rather than on an individual’s remains. I find it overall to be an exceptional, very well written, and significant contribution.