OPINION | “GOOD WILL FOUNDATION” | GWF’s CAMPAIGN AGAINST VILNIUS’S ONE RESIDENT RABBI | US & ISRAELI MEMBERS OF THE BOARD PROVIDING LEGITIMIZATION [ARCHIVED] | LITHUANIAN JEWISH COMMUNITY ISSUES | TEXTBOOK CASE OF FAILURE OF RESTITUTION FOR VALUE OF PREWAR JEWISH RELIGIOUS PROPERTIES | STOLEN ELECTION SAGA | AJC MISADVENTURES IN LITHUANIA | CHABAD IN LITHUANIA | LITVAK AFFAIRS

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OPINION

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by Dovid Katz

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When good intentions produce bad consequences, those who hold the power to act have a moral obligation to do so. Lithuania — a proud and successful EU and NATO democracy — did the right thing in providing tens of millions of euros in restitution for the assessed value of pre-Holocaust Jewish communal religious property. But the institution created to administer those funds, the Orwellian-named “Good Will Foundation,” has over a decade and a half become an entrenched empire under the same two non-rotating co-chairs.

Beyond the allocation of resources to cronies, relatives and self-promotional projects, the quango that is the Foundation has repeatedly used its publicly endowed power to marginalize, defame and undermine many of the people who actually rebuilt Jewish life and culture in Lithuania after independence. This week’s outrage — the alleged criminal assault on Rabbi Sholom-Ber Krinsky, Vilnius’s resident rabbi for more than thirty-two years — should be the proverbial last straw.

It is time to freeze the “Bad Will Foundation,” as Vilna’s Jews, not yet deprived of their humor, have come to call it, and replace it with a new Foundation for Jewish Life and Culture in Lithuania: transparent, rotating, accountable, and genuinely representative of those who have devoted years and decades to rebuilding Jewish life and culture.