OPINION | OLD VILNA JEWISH CEMETERY AT PIRAMÓNT: 2015-2025 | EARLIER OPPOSITION TO CONVENTION CENTER |  2023-2024 “WORKING GROUP” ON VILNA CEMETERY | LIST OF MEMBERS | MOUNTING OPPOSITION TO THE NEW “MUSEUM PROJECT” | THE USCPAHA  (UNITED STATES COMMISSION FOR THE PRESERVATION OF AMERICA’S HERITAGE ABROAD) | THE CPJCE (COMMITTEE FOR THE PRESERVATION OF JEWISH CEMETERIES IN EUROPE) | THE AJC (AMERICAN JEWISH COMMITTEE) | THE CER (CONFERENCE OF EUROPEAN RABBIS) | THE GWF (GOOD WILL FOUNDATION) | CEMETERIES & MASS GRAVES | HUMAN RIGHTS | CHRISTIAN-JEWISH RELATIONS

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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: The evolving cultural and historical narrative.

VILNIUS—Ignoring the potential for long-term damage to Lithuania’s stature in the eyes of the West, the nation’s prestigious Academy of Sciences is, in a shock to many, offering its premises — and thereby, it seems to some, its symbolic imprimatur and support — for the rather unscientific notion that the Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery, where many thousands still lie buried, needs to be permanently defiled and in the eyes of traditional Litvak Jewry humiliated, by reconstruction of a hated Soviet ruin as a major events center. If the project goes through, thousands would be cheering, clapping, singing, using cafés, lavatories and every sort of electronic device, surrounded by the remains of thousands of Vilna citizens who have no descendants in town to guard their burial places — because of the Holocaust. The Academy of Sciences is cited prominently in the widely-circulating petition (English translation).

The saga, that some have remarked could make for a movie plot, has included Wikileaks revelations about secret payments to the London “Committee for the Preservation of Jewish Cemeteries in Europe” (CPJCE), machinations at the US taxpayer-funded “Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad” (USCPAHA), and most recently, the about-face of the Conference of European Rabbis (CER) after unknown largess from the Lithuanian state-funded “Goodwill Foundation” (GWF), whose international board members are known to often privately disown decisions by explaining they just come to Vilnius for the photo-ops, banquets and honors each year. Meanwhile, one of the major “fixers” for construction projects on Jewish cemeteries, from the American Jewish Committee (AJC), has to date had four medals pinned on his chest for his services to to state manipulation of Jewish issues (particular on cemeteries and Holocaust revisionism). One prime minister declared, in 2021, that the convention-center-in-the-cemetery was cancelled, while another, in 2025, declared the precise opposite. In late 2025, the mayor of Vilnius, in a widely praised move, began to press for funding for a proper new convention center, morally and spiritually clean, worthy of an EU/NATO capital, to be built anew near the Seimas (parliament), a national project that all the historic peoples of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and their progeny worldwide could and would proudly cheer in joyful harmony.

“A cemetery is a cemetery is a cemetery. This would never be happening to a 500 year old Christian/Lithuanian cemetery that was the resting place of a nation’s greatest scholars and leaders.”

While a veritable alphabet soup of “major Jewish organizations” continues to provide “permissions” for Jewish cemetery destructions in Eastern Europe, a number of local non-Jewish intellectuals have stood up boldly for the honor of the country and its long-time minorities, including Dr. Andrius Kulikauskas and Julius Norwilla.

It has struck many as unseemly that in a country where 96.4% percent of the prewar Jewish population perished, and where there is much investment in “Jewish things” there would be so little sensitivity to Lithuania’s major Jewish cemetery, and to the sensibilities of the million or so religious Lithuanian-traditional (Litvak) Orthodox Jews internationally. Although the Soviets pilfered the stones, many can be recreated from the detailed records and photo that are extant,. Thousands of graves remain intact on all sides. Time and again, international “commissions” and “working groups” comprising major Jewish institution representatives from abroad, some of whom have received state medals, honors, and translations, have “approved” building plans, in effect, some say, “selling” a cemetery that is not theirs to sell. In the case of the most recent “Working Group” the one powerful statement of dissent by the world’s leading scholar on the cemetery, Prof. Shnayer (Sid) Leiman, were not even mentioned in the official reports on the group’s deliberations.

Defending History has been chronicling the saga since 2015, and bringing together statements of protest from earlier phases, including Ruta Bloshtein’s petition (which may soon be renewed), as well as those over the most recent incarnations that involve disguising the events center by “exhibitions” honoring the “former” cemetery alongside important Lithuanian national memorials which have multiple venues outside the Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery at Piramónt, in the Shnípishok district, now Snipiskes. Moreover, the most observant rabbinical authorities have approved the addition of memorials to Lithuanian national events at appropriate venues in a restored cemetery.

Indeed, the main point is often lost: A cemetery is a cemetery is a cemetery. The thousands of buried humans from a minority whose families purchased their freehold plots in perpetuity deserve the same respect and dignity as that routinely accorded to the majority population.

Equal rights proponents note that such a fate would never befall a Lithuanian / Christian medieval cemetery where great heroes of the nation still lay buried. For Litvak civilization, the heroes were (and are) not dukes, kings or warriors, but scholars, rabbis, authors, Talmudists, kabbalists, masters of charity and others who stood at the vanguard of one of the most peaceful civilizations in European History. Rabbi Elchonon Baron, president of Jewish Heritage in Lita, has made available a partial list of twenty-eight great Litvak leaders (men and women) still buried in the cemetery whose de facto permanent destruction is set to be proclaimed at (or by) the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences on January 14th.