OPINION | LITHUANIAN MISADVENTURES OF THE AMERICAN JEWISH COMMITTEE (AJC) | 2023-2024 “WORKING GROUP” ON VILNA CEMETERY | LIST OF MEMBERS | MOUNTING OPPOSITION | OLD VILNA JEWISH CEMETERY AT PIRAMÓNT | EARLIER OPPOSITION TO CONVENTION CENTER | CONFERENCE OF EUROPEAN RABBIS (CER) | THE “CPJCE” | CEMETERIES & MASS GRAVES
◊
VILNIUS—The American Jewish Committee (AJC), founded in 1906, is one of the world’s accomplished advocacy groups for Jewish, and more broadly, minority and human rights causes, in addition to other lofty missions. Those who revere and support it now need to ask frank questions about, one is sorry to say, a disturbingly consistent infidelity to Jewish causes in one country, Lithuania. The lamentable record speaks for itself. It has for decades been represented by its director of international Jewish affairs, Rabbi Andrew Baker, a recipient of multiple grand awards from a number of presidents of Lithuania. In the AJC’s name and with its wherewithal, he has consistently let down, first, the living small-c Jewish community of Lithuania; second, the true narrative of the Holocaust when it is under attack by the forces of Holocaust obfuscation, distortion and revisionism; and, finally, the preservation of Jewish cemeteries. We do not ascribe to him any nefarious motives or conscious malice on any of these counts. He is not the first, nor the last American Jewish organization bigwig to be mobilized (and a little intoxicated by a slew of high Lithuanian government medals) as a kind of “useful Jewish functionary” to provide Jewish cover and cred for government policies in countries where, in post-Holocaust Eastern Europe, local Jewish communities can be small, weak, and demographically challenged.
Then there is the problem of remembering whom one is representing after decades in one posting. “It happens all the time.” An ambassador of A sent to faraway land B, can easily forget whom they are there to to represent, especially after many decades and local state honors. That is why nation-states put strict term limits on their ambassadors.
“No slight re Lithuania. Minorities everywhere have issues with governments. The question is: Why does a powerful American organization dedicated to supporting Jewish minorities consistently take the side of government forces when they happen to be in conflict with the local Jewish community, or with wider Jewish causes, and historical sensibilities, in this one faraway land?”
The disloyalty to Lithuania’s Jews per se has taken the form of aiding and abetting, and providing cover for the disenfranchisement of community democracy on a basis of individual citizens’ votes in favor of a takeover by “associations” (the switch being introduced in the middle of the 2017 elections when things were not going well for the government-choice candidate). The whole sad saga of the stolen election has featured AJC complicity in the form of lavish financing for the state-designated entity and zero for those representing the actual community. Rabbi Baker has served for over a dozen years now as one of two non-rotating permanent co-chairs of the Good Will Foundation (GWF) board, which decides on all disbursements of the tens of millions of euros in Lithuanian government supplied restitution funding. With Mr. Baker’s support, a government-bankrolled entity has dismantled the actual democratically-run Vilnius Jewish Community which has yet to receive a single penny in funding. For a sample of the “graciousness” presented by the AJC to the Jews of Lithuania, see Rabbi Baker’s once-in-a-lifetime reply to some inspiringly courageous members of the living Jewish community who once dared write to him on these issues. One of them has recently posted a noteworthy update which references policies of his GWF co-chair, the fake-election head of the official state-sponsored “Lithuanian Jewish Community, in allegedly retaliating against Lithuanian Jews who dare speak out with divergent opinions.
On the narrative of the Holocaust, Mr. Baker, not a historian, went so far as to join the state-sponsored commission (“International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupational Regimes in Lithuania,” popularly known as the “Red-Brown Commission” for its major efforts to persuade the European Union to adopt a “Double Genocide” revisionist history of the World War II). It can help to look at how the last Holocaust Survivors and their representatives viewed this unit, which for years actively supported the 2008 Prague Declaration, the major manifesto of Double Genocide revisionism. During the years Rabbi Baker provided the commission with staunch Jewish cover, including the period of silence over kangaroo prosecutions of heroic Jewish veterans of the anti-Nazi partisans, Sir Martin Gilbert, Professor Konrad Kwiet, Professor Dov Levin, among others, resigned on principle. The head of the then independent, bona fide Jewish community added his own heartfelt words of protest. Many years later, when the head of the Red-Brown Commission made clear its views on the prosecution (and persecution) of Holocaust survivors, there was not a word of dissent from its own cherished member who represents the American Jewish Committee.
The same disturbing pattern has been, on occasion, evident in the battle against antisemitism. In March of 2008, when hundreds marched down Gedimino Boulevard, Vilnius’s main thoroughfare, shouting “Juden raus raus raus,” among other slurs, Rabbi Baker ignored numerous letters, some from local community members, begging him to speak up and call on the Lithuanian government to condemn the march and take appropriate action. Only when other major Jewish organizations indicated they would go forward on their own, was the ACJ’s hand forced. It seems that medals from the Lithuanian president are more important to some in the AJC than standing up proudly and fearlessly for the causes for which it exists — when it comes to Lithuania.
On the 2024 plan for a “museum” inside the Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery:
See recent contributions by Professor Bernard Fryshman, Rabbi Elchonon Baron, Rabbi S. J. Feffer and numerous others
On the subject of Jewish cemeteries, the AJC’s “man in Lithuania” played a key role in negotiations over decades concerning state-supported plans to destroy (and effectively plunder) Northeastern Europe’s major Jewish cemetery. First, this was by construction of two new buildings. Later, in 2015, plans were announced to convert a Soviet eyesore in the reaming area into a Convention Center. Rabbi Baker became its chief cheerleader. At a press conference in Vilnius, he publicly trashed the courageous petition of Vilna born-and-bred Ruta Bloshtein, a leader of the small group of religious Jews in Vilnius (whom Rabbi Baker never had time to meet). In concert with worldwide opposition, Ms. Bloshtein’s petition succeeded, in 2021, in bringing about the cancellation of the convention center in the cemetery project. During the process, the CPJCE, a London based group was widely discredited after being exposed for allegedly taking money while issuing “permissions” for the building. Having “brought in” the CPJCE in the first place to enable a convention center in the middle of the cemetery, and seeing it disgraced, Mr. Baker, was the second time around allegedly able to persuade the CER, a European rabbinical group, to join in machinations for a new, allegedly rigged, “Working Group” (list of members) that would rubber stamp a revised plan for a multimillion euro events center (with “Jewish themed memorial”) to emerge from the Soviet ruin, instead of it being demolished (like so many other hated Soviet relics), so the cemetery could be lovingly restored.
The Triumphant Tweet
For many years, AJC supporters denied its role in these and other schemes to the detriment of current Lithuanian Jewry, the accurate narrative of the Holocaust, and the dignified preservation of the Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery. But this past week has been witness to a veritable sensation. The AJC just issued a tweet (archived) that will be of interest to future historians of American (and/or Western) major Jewish organizations working in (de facto, if unintentional) cahoots with East European governments to provide “Jewish cover” for anti-Jewish policies (treating a half-millennium old Jewish cemetery differently from a majority-population cemetery is verily anti-Jewish). Here is a screenshot of the tweet (which comes with a link to the government’s own triumphant announcement of the “Museum” to be arise in the middle of the cemetery, a project widely condemned by Jewish religious and other authorities in recent months). For the other side of the story, see Defending History’s response to the announcement, and much more importantly, a roster of the growing international opposition to a museum in the middle of a Jewish cemetery. Something that does not exist anywhere on the planet. Moreover, do American Jewish Committee supporters in the United States not feel that the bold dissent by a single member of the Working Group, a New York professor who is a world authority on the history of Vilna’s cemeteries, should at least be mentioned amidst all the triumph?
The AJC tweet’s generic praise for Lithuanian government policy on Jewish cemeteries takes the form of a sentence right out of Orwell:
“No other government in Europe as done as much to protect a Jewish cemetery.” The “protection” has consisted of near-total obliteration of the country’s major cemetery: first by two new buildings, and now by a decision, not to demolish a Soviet eyesore in the cemetery’s heart, but to convert it into a “museum/memorial” (in reality, a venue for events with seating space for thousands).
And, then, the next sentence:
“AJC’s Rabbi Andrew Baker has been at the forefront of advancing this project.” No mention of his championing for years the convention center when that was the tool blocking preservation and restoration of the cemetery.
Why is it that the American Jewish Committee’s “Man in Europe” has been working only for Lithuanian government interests and against Jewish interests, whenever the two have, on occasion, come into conflict? No slight is intended with respect to Lithuania. Minorities around the world have issues with governments. The question here is different: Why does a powerful American organization dedicated to supporting Jewish minorities always take the opposite side in far-far away Lithuania?
In the meantime, the AJC’s supporters and donors need to be aware that Rabbi Baker has just been awarded yet another Lithuanian government award. Will the day ever come when one of his royalty-grade visits to Vilnius will include photo-ops not with prime ministers and presidents, but a couple of simple Jewish people in town? Do the American and worldwide supporters of the AJC understand the degree to which the decades-old cycle of betrayal of Lithuanian Jewry and medals for the enabler, constitute a chapter of which future generations of the AJC will be perhaps not so proud.
This roster of awards from the Lithuanian government may not be complete, but it is illustrative. In all cases the awards are “for merits to Lithuania”…
In 2006, from the then president:
In 2012, from the then foreign minister:
And now, on the eve of the triumphant government announcement of the “museum in the old Jewish cemetery” in 2024, from the current president:
