OPINION | YAD VASHEM MANIPULATED | GENOCIDE CENTER
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The annual marches of March the 16th in Riga, Latvia, honor veterans of the local Waffen SS legion. These marches, sponsored by the co-ruling National Alliance, are consistently criticized by bodies of the European Union, the United Nations, and the Council of Europe. The most recent criticism came from the European Parliament resolution of 25 October 2018 on the rise of neo-fascist violence in Europe:
“AC. whereas every year on 16 March thousands of people gather in Riga for Latvian Legion Day to honor Latvians who served in the Waffen-SS;”
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There are ome strange twists in the 21st century history of Holocaust collaborator Jonas Noreika (who continues to be honored by street names, plaques, engraved stones and more).
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I was taken aback by the news being informally reported. “They came and they fenced off a part of the Radviliškis (Radvíleshik, Radvílishok) Jewish cemetery for themselves,” people told me. This was a well-known Jewish shtetl before the Holocaust. Without further ado I went to check it. A house and big chunk of property with it, were fenced off and for sale, clearly within the cemetery perimeter (of course with gravestones long pilfered from that section, and buried people underneath undisturbed). My photos of all parts of the cemetery are here.
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VILNIUS—The elected leadership of the Vilnius Jewish Community (VJC) today published on its website, and on its Facebook page, an English version of the Lithuanian original that appeared on 10 October on the website as well as, on the same date, in the form of a Baltic News Service (BNS) press release, providing the contact name of Simon Gurevich (Simonas Gurevičius), chair of the community and one of its twenty-one member elected council. The VJC, representing the more than 2,000 Jews of Vilnius in affiliation with groups in Šiauliai, Klaipeda and others, represents the vast majority of today’s living Jewish citizens in Lithuania. In fact, its electoral conference of May 2017 was the largest electoral conference of Jewish citizens in Lithuania this century.
“And most importantly […], to provide new elections for the chairpersonship of the Lithuanian Jewish Community in accordance with the honest rules that have been in place for many years, taking into account the votes of all the Jews of Lithuania, and not the ‘associations’ of ‘close friends’ who are themselves dependent for funding on the grace of the chairperson.”
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Several dozen Vilnius Jews turned up today for the funeral of Jacob Piliansky at the city’s current Jewish cemetery at Sudervės 28. Decades ago, Piliansky, an engineer by trade, relocated to Washington DC (and for a time to the Netherlands) where he built a new life and career. But when his mother back in Vilnius, the legendary Dobke Jonis, turned ninety, he decided to return to his native Lithuania and live with her for the remainder of their years. Dobke (Dora Piliansky, 1912–2014), who passed away at age 102, was a cultural icon of her shtetl Zézmer (today’s Žiežmariai), whose prolific writings and drawings remain a testament, as does her testimony on the bestial brutality of the LAF (Lithuanian Activist Front) fascists in June 1941 who turned back Jewish escapees on the roads to ensure they would be trapped in the Nazi choke-hold. She brought up her children — Jacob (Yasha, Yankl) and his older sister Fréydke (Frida Piliansky Zavalkovsky, 1942–2016) — to stand proudly for historic truth and to fear nothing and nobody when it comes to telling the story of Lithuanian Jewry in its homeland. Or plain and simple, to stand up for what is right. Such folks do not often enjoy lifetimes of unbroken popularity or the easiest of times.
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PREAMBLE
“The Lost Shtetl” will not be a generic community of faceless Litvaks. It will make tangible the lives of real individuals. But will we learn about the real individuals from the town and its region who destroyed them? Their names and faces? Or will we simply tuck them away into the phrase: “The Nazis and their local collaborators murdered 664 Šeduva Jews in Liaudiškiai forest”?
In this week’s (30 Sept.) edition of Fareed Zakaria GPS, the CNN host interviewed Ukraine’s president Petro Poroshenko. The conversation stressed Ukraine’s appreciable progress in spite of (in some sense — because of) Vladimir Putin’s aggression, revanchism and incessant mischief-making.
In a website supplement, the CNN host recently posted some tough questions on state corruption that he did indeed put to Ukraine’s leader. But did Fareed miss an opportunity to bring up something else, something that so much of the Western media is keeping under wraps to the point of rendering it strangely unmentionable?
Will a major Western journalist follow up with the Ukrainian president along the lines of:

IMAGE OF THE DAY: Elected chairperson of the Vilnius Jewish Community, Simon Gurevich, was not allowed past the security barrier, barring him from the Pope’s event to commemorate the Vilna Ghetto. At the earlier event at Ponár, he was not allowed to deliver his prepared remarks.
Pope Francis’s two-day visit to Lithuania this weekend includes a symbolic stop at the Vilna Ghetto on his second day, September 23, at roughly 4 PM at Rūdininkai Square. On that day, 75 years ago, Nazi Germans liquidated the Vilna Ghetto, murdering some of its Jews in Paneriai Forest (Ponár), and moving the rest to concentration camps in Latvia, Estonia and Germany. Since 1994, it has been the National Day of Commemoration of the Genocide of Lithuania’s Jews. Now it will surely be linked in the Lithuanian psyche with this visit by Pope Francis, and perhaps some day, Saint Francis.
However, his visit is also a chance for him to make plain to the children of God our lack of empathy for Lithuania’s Jews. A very short detour to the “Vilnius Sports Palace” — and a heavenly nod by the Pope — would let us tear down that “Soviet temple”, resurrect the holy Jewish cemetery beneath it, and enjoy a symbol of Litvak and Lithuanian friendship forever. This brings to mind the detour Jesus made in Jericho, when two blind men called out, “Lord, have mercy on us, you son of David!” And Jesus halted the crowd.
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JERUSALEM—A 12 September 2018 letter from ten members of Israel’s Knesset (parliament) to Lithuania’s president, Dalia Grybauskaite, was released to the media today. The letter calls on the Lithuanian president to cancel plans for a national convention center in the heart of the old Vilna Jewish cemetery and to “find a reasonable alternative” for situating the new convention center.
The Israeli parliamentarians’ letter, at the bottom of this report and available from Defending History as PDF, comes on the heels of the recent appeal by three United States senators, and last year’s call in the same spirit by twelve members of the United States House of Representatives. An international petition initiated by a leading member of Vilnius’s Orthodox Jewish community, Ruta Bloshtein, has to date achieved 44,400 signatures. In addition Litvak (Lithuanian tradition) rabbis and rabbinical organizations internationally, along with many other writers from diverse backgrounds, have put in writing unequivocal opposition to the project. Within Lithuanian society, the two leaders of the movement to save the old Jewish cemetery from the convention center are both non-Jewish citizens whose writings and actions are an international credit to the country and its capacity for robust discourse. See the Andrius Kulikauskas and Julius Norwilla sections in DH.
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DH’s Israel Page
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Have you ever missed an anniversary, a birthday, or event and regretted it for years, or even a lifetime? I have. It was missing out in attending the 1908 International Conference on Yiddish Language that took place exactly 110 years ago this year at Czernowitz, a city that served as the regional capital of the Hapsburgs (modern day Chernivtsi, Ukraine).
You may ask even how was it distinctly possible that a man my age could have been around 110 years ago. For the past nearly thirty years, I have immersed myself in learning about Jewish life and infrastructure in prewar Europe, plus seeing what the role of Yiddish was, if at all, in that culture. For most Jews of this age, modern history began with the Holocaust and the creation of the third commonwealth, the modern-day State of Israel. Events like the Czernowitz Conference, or the Kishinev Pogroms, World War I or the Leo Frank affair are just not in our lexicon, even though they all occurred in the twentieth century, thus making them modern, not ancient, history.
As Jews, it is incumbent upon us to fulfill the obligation of “Zakhor,” “To Remember.” We are to look back at our history and internalize it in such a way to feel just like we were there, and feel what our brethren felt. This is just not reflected in our reading of the Passover Haggadah, but everything we do and say in life. To do “Zakhor” means we have a fuller understanding of ourselves in order to be able to navigate the future. Zakhor enables us to be more comfortable with self. That is why I went on a personal quest over the last 25 plus years to visit libraries, read books, make visits to Poland and Ukraine to meet with political leaders, rabbis, community leaders, and lay people so that I can learn and experience.
Czernowitz 1908 symbolized to me that turning point in Jewish history. A part of me felt that I did spiritually attend that conference, but realistically, I knew that it was a physical impossibility. Then, in July, Dovid Katz, a leading Yiddish scholar, posted in Facebook that he was invited to be the keynote speaker at the 2018 International Commemorative Conference of Yiddish Culture and Language at Czernowitz to mark the 110th anniversary of the very first conference.
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VILNIUS—The 21 person democratically elected board of the Vilnius Jewish Community, representing the approximately 2,200 Jews resident in the Lithuanian capital, today released an approved English translation of its 29 August 2018 statement on Jewish heritage in partnership with a number of smaller regional Jewish communities throughout the country. The original Lithuanian text is available here, and appears at the end of this report below.
Those following the saga of attempts to humiliate the Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery by situating a national convention center in its heart, will be encouraged by the explicit language concerning the project contained in the statement:
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VILNIUS—The central office of the World Jewish Congress (WJC) today tweeted uncritical support for “Black Ribbon Day” failing to note that the August 23rd remembrance day sponsored by ultranationalist elements in Eastern Europe, has been one of the most cunning tools for writing the Holocaust out of history via the “Double Genocide” movement that seeks to “equalize” Nazi and Soviet crimes as per the Prague Declaration of 2008 (which indeed has the day among its “requirements”). Defending History is proud to have been part of the team that produced the Europarliamentary rejoinder, the 2012 Seventy Years Declaration (SYD), which was signed by 71 European Union parliamentarians, including eight enormously courageous Lithuanian MPs and MEPs. SYD calls for “distinct days and distinct programs to remember the Holocaust and other victims of other twentieth century totalitarian regimes”.