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

◊

OPINION

◊

by Dovid Katz

◊

When good intentions produce bad consequences, those with 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. Yet the institution created to administer those funds, the Orwellian-named “Good Will Foundation” (GWF), has, over a decade and a half, become an entrenched structure under the same two non-rotating co-chairs. The latest lark conceives plonking a modernist multi-million euro luxury building for GWF executive offices, among other things, on top of the precious remnants of the Vilna Great Synagogue.

Beyond directing resources to cronies, relatives and self-promotional projects, the Foundation has used its publicly endowed power to marginalize, defame and undermine various of the people who actually rebuilt Jewish life and culture in Lithuania after independence. Among the most serious developments have been the dismantling of long-standing Jewish community democracy through the disenfranchisement of individual voters (that 2017 change having come in the middle of an election campaign that was “going the other way”); the use of substantial funds to construct ersatz communities for the purpose of undermining existing ones not deemed sufficiently compliant (most notoriously, ensuring that the democratically preserved Vilnius Jewish Community receives not a penny and has no premises, while a concocted “second one in an office” fixes things on paper); repeated failures to stand up for Jewish values in the spirit exemplified by the community before restitution; and the use of security and police in ways that have served to harass and intimidate.

This week’s deeply troubling episode — 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 came in the context of the long-running campaign to “totally conquer” the city’s one functioning synagogue on top of all the rest. For the first time in living memory, Jewish people in Vilnius feel they have no address in town where they are made to feel welcome: neither a community center nor a synagogue free of the debilitating spirit of a restitution-endowed Good Will Foundation establishment that has, in their view, profoundly eviscerated the very Jewish life it was meant to preserve.

It is time to retire 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, inclusive, rotating, accountable, and genuinely representative of those who have devoted years and decades to rebuilding Jewish life and culture.