Editor’s note: The Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Israel office today released for the record the following September 2007 email exchange with the director of the Los Angeles based “Friends of the Vilnius Yiddish Institute” (VYI).
United States
Wiesenthal Center’s Israel Office Releases 2007 Correspondence with LA Board Chief of Vilnius Yiddish Institute
Double Genocide Lands by Stealth in Washington D.C. for “Black Ribbon Day”
[record of front page coverage]
“Double Genocide” Lands in the United States of America
BY STEALTH BOMBER OUT OF THE EAST, UNDER THE RADAR
Red-Brown Commission’s PR Roadshow Heads for Philadelphia PA Gig on November 10th
Three members of the Lithuanian government’s renewed “Red-Brown Commission” are to headline its next American PR event, scheduled for Philadelphia on 10 November. The Commission is widely seen as one of the politico-academic engines of Holocaust revisionism in the European Union in the spirit of “Double Genocide.” Moreover the body publicly supports the (2008) Prague Declaration, the “bible” of the Double Genocide movement. Its website does not mention existence of the European parliamentary rejoinder, the (2012) Seventy Years Declaration, signed by seventy-one EU parliamentarians, including six courageous MPs and MEPs from Lithuania.
“Rewriting History” on the Road in the USA
Rewriting History: New Documentary Film on the Shocking New Holocaust Revisionism in Eastern Europe
REVIEWS OF REWRITING HISTORY
Film’s website ◊ Sign the Seventy Years Declaration ◊ Donate HERE
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April 28th 2013 in LA
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Charles Adès Fishman Adds Voice, on Yom Hashoah, to Sutzkever Prize Fracas
O P I N I O N
by Charles Adès Fishman
Dear Ed,
I could hardly believe it when I was told that you were participating in the Sutzkever Translation Prize competition as a judge. The Ed Hirsch whose work I’ve read and admired for years—the Ed Hirsch I’ve admired for years—wouldn’t allow himself to be used in a way that will help the Neo-Nazi forces in Lithuania remove the stain of antisemitism from its persecution of individuals who served as Jewish partisans during the Holocaust years.
Peter Thabit Jones Issues Open Letter on Sutzkever Translation Prize
O P I N I O N
by Peter Thabit Jones
Dear Mr. Hirsch
As a fellow poet and human being, I implore you to withdraw as a judge in a competition that will be part of a series of events misrepresenting things, in effect for the benefit of certain elements in the Lithuanian government. Alternatively, as suggested by colleagues, a simple requirement that each of the wrongfully defamed Jewish Holocaust Survivors who joined the anti-Nazi resistance be issued a full and public apology would bring the matter to a rapid close.
Arthur Dobrin’s Open Letter to Ed Hirsch
O P I N I O N
by Arthur Dobrin
I am writing to you because it has come to my attention that you are to be the judge in the Avrom Sutzkever Poetry Translation Prize. Many years ago I came across a book of Sutzkever and have used several lines from his poems in a book of mine on bereavement. I was deeply touched by his work and wanted to share it with others.
Background Reading on the Shift in US Foreign Policy on Holocaust Denial from c. 2009
BUT
Groups of members of the US Congress have continued to speak out with courage: 1 Aug 2008; 3 Dec 2009; 25 Sept 2012.
SEE ALSO SECTION ON US POLICY ON THE BALTIC HOLOCAUST AND RELATED ISSUES
Efraim Zuroff, “The Threat of Baltic Ultra-Nationalism” in the Guardian, 3 April 2010.
Efraim Zuroff, “No Tolerance for False History” in the Jerusalem Post, 1 May 2010.
Marc Tracy, “Rosenthal Lays Off Lithuania” in Tablet, 3 May 2010.
Tolerance Education? State-Sponsored Commission Uses its Website to Call Holocaust Survivor a “Liar” & to Demand “Apology from Jewish Community”
O P I N I O N
by Dovid Katz
Educators, diplomats, historians and journalists thought they had seen it all when it came to Holocaust-in-Lithuania issues in recent times. But an online attack by the state sponsored “history commission” on a local Holocaust survivor, Professor Pinchos Fridberg, who is deeply involved in honoring righteous Lithuanians who saved a Jewish neighbor, because he expressed his views against distortion of the Holocaust? That is a bit much even for here.
UPDATE of 21 February 2014:
One year later: Defamation continues on Commission website;
See Chronology of a Debate and what Pinchos Fridberg actually said…
US State Department Supporting Cassedy Book Tour Without Inclusion of Opposing Points of View
As readers of Defending History are aware, many American citizens and others who care deeply about the memory of the Holocaust being accurately transmitted have been devastated by the shift in US State Department policy toward appeasement of far-right Baltic revisionism, apparently in the context of various geopolitical issues. The topic is the focus of a section of DH.
BACKGROUND READING
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.
New Year’s Call on the US State Department to Reject Politics of Holocaust Denial
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
Instead of politely protesting, the US Embassy in Vilnius financed a camouflage symposium on Holocaust issues to deflect attention from the week’s event. Framed to honor T. Snyder’s book Bloodlands, it also featured the head of YIVO.
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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
Shock of 2012: 1941 Nazi Puppet Prime Minister Reburied with Full Honors
Compiled by Dovid Katz
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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
An Open Letter to Ed Hirsch
O P I N I O N
Dear Mr. Hirsch,
Congratulations on your selection as judge of the new literary translation contest named for the eminent late Yiddish poet Avrom (Abraham) Sutzkever (1913-2010). News of the contest was today disseminated far and wide (information affixed below, for readers’ rapid reference, and to help inspire more entries in your competition).
You may know that in addition to being a major twentieth century Yiddish poet and editor, Sutzkever survived the Holocaust by escaping the Vilna Ghetto to join the anti-Nazi Jewish partisans. You may or may not know that elderly Lithuanian Jewish Holocaust survivors, who like Sutzkever escaped certain death by joining the partisans, but who are still alive and relatively well, have been defamed as “war criminals” by the same Lithuanian government that recently invested in a Sutzkever plaque in Vilnius, brought over his Israeli family for festivities, and invests in ever more Jewish and Yiddish PR stunts (complete with honors for compliant foreigners) to camouflage a campaign of revisionism.
This is on top of a disturbing toleration of serious antisemitism, including in recent years, state-sanctioned neo-Nazi marches in the heart of the capital city on independence day, the legalization of public swastikas (the UN Human Rights Committee has commented), and inaction regarding front pages of mass circulation newspapers worthy of the 1930s. The most famous examples in recent years are depictions of the Jew and the Gay controlling the world (2009), and, less than a year ago, of one of the city’s resident rabbis.
New York Based Assistance to Lithuanian Jews Speaks Out on Lithuanian-Jewish Issues
The following is page 1 of the new (Fall 2012) issue of L’hava — The Litvak Flame, published in New York City by Assistance to Lithuanian Jews, Inc, that is headed by attorney Josef Griliches. The journal is edited by Mr. Griliches and Brian Biller.
Self-Induced Confusion
B O O K S
by Olga Zabludoff
Review of We Are Here: Memories of the Lithuanian Holocaust by Ellen Cassedy. University of Nebraska Press, 2012.
Had this title been billed as a simple memoir of Cassedy’s trip to Lithuania in the summer of 2004, my criticism of her book would be tempered. She had gone to the land of her ancestors to study Yiddish at the Vilnius Yiddish Institute and to connect with her Jewish roots. The professors and mentors she encounters at the Yiddish Institute come alive, as do the various Lithuanians and Jews with whom she connects. Cassedy is a good writer who captures physical details well. But even at that, this reviewer found the memoir to be superficial.
The major problem is that Cassedy’s book is being promoted as the Bible of the Lithuanian Holocaust by advocates for the current Lithuanian government and elite establishment which aspire to paint for the outside world a distorted version of the Holocaust. A version defined in shades of gray and the confusion they generate. A version that incorporates the mythology of equivalency between crimes committed by the Nazi and Soviet occupation regimes.
SEE ALSO THE REVIEWS BY
Dovid Katz in the Algemeiner Journal
Allan Nadler in the Forward
Efraim Zuroff in Haaretz
The Disquieting 2010-2012 Record of the American Embassy in Vilnius, Lithuania
- April 2010: The Wiesenthal Center’s Dr. Efraim Zuroff comments (in the Guardian) on the American ambassador’s assurance that “The United States and Lithuania are partners in the fight against antisemitism and in efforts to address the legacy of the Holocaust” bereft of any mention of the “slight problems,” e.g. state-sanctioned neo-Nazi marches on independence day, attempted prosecution of Holocaust survivors, glorification of Nazi perpetrators, disturbing comments by top officials and a general decline into the acceptability of antisemitism.
- Continue reading
Simon Wiesenthal Center Laments Yivo’s Betrayals of Jewish Causes for the Sake of Lithuanian State PR
O P I N I O N
by Efraim Zuroff
reprinted with the author’s permission from today’s Times of Israel
This week, one of the more shameful events in Lithuanian-Jewish relations since the Baltic republic regained independence in 1991 will be hosted in New York by the once-venerable Yivo Institute. Under the heading “Reclaiming the Jewish Narrative in Lithuania Today,” the Yiddish research institute will host Markas Zingeris, whom it describes as a “Lithuanian-Jewish poet and writer,” to speak about relations between Jews and Lithuanians since the fall of Communism.