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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1. Sanitization and glorification of Holocaust perpetrators: the 1941 Lithuanian Activist Front (LAF) and the status of June 23rd  and the the First Week of the Lithuanian Holocaust. Will authorities really go ahead with a memorial “collegium” in the Seimas in June 2026 (85th anniversary of the outbreak of the Lithuanian Holocaust on 23 June 1941) that would glorify the killers?

2. Preservation of the remnants of the Jewish Partisan Fort in the forest next door to the brand new German Brigade. Legacy and last wish of the late Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky.

3. Equal human rights include the right of the dead of annihilated minorities to be left in peace: Fate of the Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery and international appeals to demolish the Soviet ruin on site and lovingly restore the cemetery. Recent developments.

4. Preservation of the museum contents of the Green House (Pamenkalnio St. 12) intact, whether on site or moved to a distinct portion of the new Holocaust museum under construction in the former Ghetto Library building. It is Eastern Europe’s last Jewish museum created entirely by Holocaust survivors themselves. Be sure to visit the Green House when in Vilnius, including the room dedicated to prewar Jewish culture and life.

5. Combatting the East European history revisionism known as “Double Genocide” that equates Nazi and Soviet crimes in a construct whose corollaries include glorification of perpetrators, vilification of Holocaust survivors who joined the anti-Nazi resistance, downgrade of the Holocaust, renewal of antisemitic tropes of Jewish responsibilities for communism, and a descent of morally clear public memory into a concerted effort to obfuscate the Holocaust in East European and world history.

6. Opposition to East European laws that criminalize opinions that reject Double Genocide revisionism. Preservation of Western standards of Freedom of Speech.

7. For centuries, there have been in Vilna two most sacred sites from world Jewry’s perspective: the Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery at Piramont (no. 3 above), and the site of the Great Synagogue Courtyard (Vilner Shulheyf), particularly the Great Synagogue (Di Greyse Shul; Di Vilner Shot-shul) itself. While there is and would be much international enthusiasm for uncovering and preserving the ruins, with a nearby prayer houselet nearby for pilgrims, or a project to rebuild the Great Synagogue as such, there would, alas be years and decades and centuries of strife, consternation, protest and pain by plans to have a modern architectural project dedicated to a new headquarters for today’s ersatz “stolen election state restitution sponsored ‘official Jewish community'” and its leaders’ activities, even worse if it includes business interests, and non-traditional forms of Judaism. There is plenty of room for all that on all four sides of the sacred site.

8. The tens of millions of euros in the government’s “Restitution” program continues to be in the hands of a small clique that unceremoniously shut down Jewish community democracy in 2017. Zero goes to the democratically structured Vilnius Jewish Community that represents most of the remaining two or so thousand Jews in Lithuania. Zero goes to the rabbis and traditional religious Jewish groups who have given decades to build Jewish life here. It is high time for the state to take moral responsibility for the just administration of funds it provides, and to put a stop to the current abuse of these funds to run campaigns of destruction against the local rabbis and the remnant Jewish community. See for example DH’s sections on Rabbi Sholom Ber Krinsky and Rabbi Elchonon Baron.

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CULTURAL PROJECTS IN PROGRESS…

1. The Lithuanian Yiddish Video Archive (LYVA).

2. The Yiddish in Ukraine Video Archive (YUVA).

3. Online Mini Museum of Old Jewish Vilna.

4. Online Mini Museum of Jewish Life in Interwar Lithuania.

5. The Yiddish Cultural Dictionary (YCD).

6. Bible translation into Lithuanian Yiddish.

7. Yizkor Book for the shtetl Mikháleshik.

8. Production of a manual of Ashkenazic Hebrew.