Jerusalem Post’s ‘Report’ on ‘Kaunas Capital of European Culture’ Fails to Even Mention Public Shrines Glorifying Local Holocaust Perpetrators




OPINION  |  MEDIA WATCH  |  KAUNAS  | GLORIFICATION OF COLLABORATORS

Not for the first time, the Jerusalem Post has sent a “correspondent” to Lithuania to do a write-up in the professional style of a journalist’s report, that serves in fact to facilitate the project of some branches of the Lithuanian government to falsify Holocaust history (2013 example). This falsification is not in the spirit of classical denial of the last century. It is rather primarily a case of dotting the country with shrines (street names, plaques, sculptures, school and university hall names), all in the public space, all financed by the state, that actually glorify local Holocaust collaborators and perpetrators, while simultaneously investing a fortune in “Jewish events” that will hypnotize naive foreign visitors who like royal treatment, photo-ops with officials, and delightful attention.

But a professional journalist, and her publication, have a higher level of responsibility than the average “useful Jewish idiot” who is manipulated into not even noticing, for example, that one of this year’s “Capitals of European Culture 2022” — Kaunas, historically Kovno, Yiddish Kóvne — made it through the year without a single major visiting journalist having exposed the city’s refusal to remove even one of the city’s shrines to collaborators. (There are other major components to the state-sponsored revisionism underway, notably in the realm of academia and history where “Double Genocide” is peddled to downgrade the Holocaust; attempted prosecutions of Holocaust survivors for “war crimes” with no apologies to follow their failure; career destruction of courageous, inspirational Lithuanians who dare dissent, and more.)

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Today’s Jerusalem Post article

Lev Golinkin in the Forward

Defending History’s Kaunas section 

Interactive Kaunas map (in progress)

The new Jerusalem Post article by Barbara Sofer, which, adding insult to injury, explicitly includes confronting the Holocaust in the headline and the article itself, all without mentioning what precisely “Kaunas’s problem” is. Perhaps, for starters, visitors interested in the city that honors Holocaust perpetrators and succeeds to manipulate journalists to avoid mentioning it, can have a look at any number of public sources before deciding to aid and abet the incarnations of current Holocaust denial by omitting the main point. See for example, Lev Golinkin’s study in the Forward, or the dozens of reports in Defending History’s Kaunas section.

Even a major recent book in English, by Chicago-based Silvia Foti, on her grandfather, Holocaust perpetrator J. Noreika, did not stir the Jerusalem Post journalist into noticing the Noreika shrines in K-town. Among others there’s the street name that uses the mass murderer’s nom de guerre (“General Storm”), a typical part of the project to invert and “fix” the Holocaust by using state and European Union funding to cast the perpetrators as supposed romantic freedom fighters.

In some views, the setting up de novo, deep in the twenty-first century, of a lecture hall name and sculpture glorifying Hitler’s 1941 puppet prime minister in Kaunas at the city’s “liberal” university (Vytautas Magnus U.) is the most odious stain on the city (that is this year’s Capital of European Culture), apparently unmentionable by foreign journalists in tow (thereby precluding public discussion that could lead to real progress). Still, there was quite a storm of protest back in 2012 when that major Hitler collaborator’s remains were transferred from the U.S. to Kaunas for reburial with full honors (complete with complaints against “the Jews” by the university’s major “liberal” professor…).

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