◊
APOLOGIES. THIS PAGE HAS MOVED HERE
https://defendinghistory.com/mini-museum-of-jewish-life-in-interwar-lithuania
◊
APOLOGIES. THIS PAGE HAS MOVED HERE
https://defendinghistory.com/mini-museum-of-jewish-life-in-interwar-lithuania
◊
BERLIN—In a groundbreaking interview with Dr. Clemens Heni, director of the Berlin International Center for the Study of Antisemitism (BICSA) in the leading German liberal daily Frankfurter Rundschau, Heni criticizes the ongoing comparison of Hitler and Stalin and the relativization of the Holocaust. He reminds readers, in the interview conducted by journalist Katja Thorwarth, what psychoanalyst Zvi Rix had to say about German reception of the Holocaust: “The Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.”
VILNIUS—With the permission of the publishers of The Weekly of Vilnius, we are reproducing extracts of two comments from this week’s edition that covers Lithuanian news from 11 to 17 December 2017. The Weekly of Vilnius is sometimes considered to be this city’s most prestigious English-language news publication, famed for its editorial independence and capacity for presenting views that tend to be ignored in the nationalist and ultranationalist media that can be fixated with the “official line.” In the spirit of classic journalism, The Weekly of Vilnius has no online edition (there is an online description and Facebook page) and is available weekly by emailed PDF or hard copy to its elite circle of subscribers, known to include embassies, government agencies, captains of industry, politicians, academics, libraries, and think tanks.
See also: Does ambassador’s gesture “legitimize” naming of 2018 for an alleged collaborator?
First, on the subject of this week’s visit with flowers by the ambassador of Israel to the daughter and (successful) chief campaigner for 2018 to be named by the Lithuanian parliament for an alleged Holocaust collaborator (see Defending History‘s coverage), The Weekly of Vilnius highlights, accurately, we believe, the current Israeli embassy’s proclivity for implicitly claiming to act for “the interests of Lithuanian (or Litvak) Jewry” and to speak for “Lithuanian-Jewish relations” when in fact the (sometimes short-term) interests of the present Israeli government are (quite naturally) the determining factor. In fact, the embassy has arguably established a record of harming Lithuanian Jewish interests since it was opened in early 2015. Most shockingly, the Israeli Foreign Ministry seems to have “muscled in” even on restitution payments, deriving from the religious properties of the annihilated communities, now intended for the survival of the Lithuanian Jewish community. See the relevant entries in the grant items enumerated here and here.
VILNIUS—Israel may have crossed a red line today when it was flaunted on the major News portal Delfi.lt here, both in Lithuanian and in English, that Israeli ambassador Amir Maimon had found the time this week to stage a demonstrative PR-photographed visit to the chief campaigner for the parliament’s decision less than one month ago to name 2018 in honor of Adolfas Ramanauskas — his daughter in Vilnius, Auksutė Ramanauskaitė-Skokauskienė, who is a prime icon of the ultranationalist camp that often glorifies various collaborators and participants in the Holocaust on the grounds that they were also anti-Soviet activists. The PR move came just after a major political commentator asked what Lithuania is getting in return for its staunch political support for the Netanyahu government.
UPDATES TO THIS ARTICLE: WEEKLY OF VILNIUS COMMENTARY; AMBASSADOR’S BETRAYAL OF HOLOCAUST HISTORY A FIASCO AS LITHUANIA VOTES ANYWAY AGAINST U.S. DECISION TO MOVE ITS EMBASSY (PARTING WITH NEIGHBORING LATVIA)
One of the PR photos released shows the ambassador posing underneath adulatory photos of the 1941 pro-Nazi militiaman (from various other periods in his life). Of course Lithuania has a vast number of inspirational historical heroes, including many anti-Soviet heroes, who were not Holocaust collaborators, and state decisions to honor collaborators cause untold pain to survivors, their families, and the remnant Jewish communities in Eastern Europe. They all send a message that becomes part of the history-revision campaign to downgrade the Holocaust in the context of “Double Genocide” revisionism.

◊
VILNIUS—Herbert Block, a veteran member of the American government’s Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad, and chair of its committee on the old Vilnius Jewish cemetery, visited yesterday and today for two sessions with staff of the Defending History team here in the Lithuanian capital. Mr. Block is a well-known and beloved figure for the Lithuanian Jewish community, with whom he worked closely for many years (1999 to 2015), during his tenure as Assistant Executive Vice President of the Joint Distribution Committee (JDC or “Joint”), where his work included coordinating successful efforts to achieve restitution that could enable the Jewish community’s survival for generations to come. At present, he is executive director of the American Zionist Movement (AZM). Previously Mr. Block served as Assistant Director for Intergovernmental and Public Affairs for the New York City Independent Budget Office (1996-1999) and was Deputy Director for Intergovernmental Relations at the federal Corporation for National and Community Service in 1994-1995. He was Assistant to the Mayor of the City of New York from 1990 to 1993 and Special Assistant to the Manhattan Borough President from 1986 to 1989. For years he has been a member of the World Jewish Restitution Organization (WJRO) with specialization in the Baltic region and Poland.
Herb Block explained how hard he has been working behind the scenes to ensure the cemetery’s preservation, and pledged his firm personal commitment to work resolutely for the convention center project to be moved to another venue in town — away from Vilna’s Old Jewish Cemetery.
As anyone who has been following events in Lithuania for the last several years surely knows by now, the country sports street names and monuments honoring locals who collaborated with the Nazis during World War Two. It was in this context that I attended an event in Washington, DC yesterday at the Wilson Center’s Kennan Institute discussing Ruta Vanagaite’s controversial book “Our People” (it appeared in Lithuanian in 2016) that blows open the door describing the true extent of Lithuanian collaboration in the Holocaust. Vanagaite and her co-author Efraim Zuroff , director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Israel Office, spoke at the event.
◊
The national scandal unleashed by the Lithuanian Rūta Vanagaitė and the Jewish Efraim Zuroff via their statements about Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas, is gradually losing momentum. The Seimas (parliament) went right ahead and declared the incoming year, 2018, to be The Year of Ramanauskas-Vanagas. That is sad. Three years ago, I wrote about this person’s activities in Druskininkai in 1941. Society back then was silent about it. It was only the desire of some politicians to glorify this personage that led to the aforementioned Lithuanian and Jewish commentators to talk about him. They spoke loudly and an antisemitic bubble burst. Vanagaitė’s statement had some inaccuracies. The very statement was taken as an insult by the mainstream. Public details about Zuroff’s statement were scarce. My 2014 article was among those details.
This paper was published today by Taylor and Francis on its website. It appears in Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust, volume 31, no. 3, pp. 285-295 (Dec. 2017). Dapim is edited by the Strochlitz Institute for Holocaust Research at the University of Haifa.
In Lithuania, the primary provider for Holocaust studies for close to two decades has been the state-sponsored International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes in Lithuania (ICECNSORL), which was established in 1998 by decree of the nation’s president and is housed in the office of its prime minister, embedding it in the highest strata of Lithuanian politics. Several of its activities have enabled significant contributions in research, education, and public commemoration.
◊
PEN America released this statement on its website today:
NEW YORK—The decision by the Alma Littera publishing house to cut all ties with their author Ruta Vanagaite, and to remove remaining copies of all of her five books from circulation and pulp them, is a troubling overreaction and should be reconsidered, said PEN America today.
The publisher’s decision to remove and destroy all of Vanagaite’s books was a response to her recent criticism of Adolfas Ramanauskas, a Lithuanian nationalist widely perceived as a hero. Vanagaite previously touched on sensitive historical issues in her most recent book, Mūsiškiai (Our People), published in Lithuania in 2016, which discusses the role of Lithuanian nationalists and freedom fighters in the persecution of Jewish Lithuanians and the Holocaust during World War II. Lithuania still denies their role in WWII and the Lithuanian authorities claimed that the book jeopardized national security. The destruction and removal of Vanagaite’s books demonstrates the tight borders of what is acceptable criticism of a national hero in Lithuania. Since the publication of the book, Vanagaite has received threats, which have escalated in recent weeks; a suit against her for slander and denigration of a deceased person has also been filed with the prosecutor by a patriotic group (the prosecutor has declined to take up the case, finding no evidence of malicious intent).
Lietuvių kalba
Žemiau – lietuviškas teksto, kurį Centrinis JAV ir Kanados rabinų kongresas publikavo 2015 m. vienbalsiu sprendimu hebrajiškai ir angliškai, vertimas:
◊
2015 m. birželio 23 d., antradienis
Mus visus siaubingai sukrėtė žinios, kad Lietuvos valdžia ketina renovuoti ir vėl atidaryti Sporto rūmus, pastatytus komunistiniais laikais, daugmaž prieš penkiasdešimt metų, senųjų Vilniaus Šnipiškių kapinių širdyje. Dešimtmečius buvęs masių pasilinksminimo vieta, pastatas daugelį metų stovėjo ir tebestovi apleistas.
Lietuvių kalba
Žemiau pateikiame laiško, pasirašyto dvylikos JAV kongresmenų 2017 m. liepos 28 d. ir išsiųsto Jos Ekscelencijai Lietuvos Prezidentei Daliai Grybauskaitei, vertimą:
◊
Jos Ekscelencijai Prezidentei Daliai Grybauskaitei:
Rašome norėdami išreikšti savo nesutikimą su tuo, kad senieji Vilniaus koncertų ir sporto rūmai būtų paversti konferencijų centru, stovinčiu ant senųjų Šnipiškių rajono žydų kapinių Vilniuje. Vietoje to, kad apleisti Sporto rūmai būtų plečiami, turėtų būti išsaugota šventa vieta – senosios žydų kapinės.
◊
LONDON—It’s that time of year again. The “Litvak” and “Yiddish” grandees of University College London’s Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies, and various cohorts from near and far, queue up to bask in the pot-of-lentil glories offered for their repeated championing of state PR, even when it entailed betrayal of the interests and causes of Holocaust survivors, the actual Litvak legacy, and bona fide Yiddish language and culture. The roster from previous years includes the 2011 conference intended to “fix” the narrative of the Holocaust in the direction of Double Genocide, which resulted in a major protest that included, to her (and the department’s) great credit, the then head-of-department (For the Economist’s coverage see here and here; more media). The record also includes the 2012 refusal of conference organizers to allow a Holocaust survivor five minutes to read a polite statement of concern.
◊
◊
Delfi.lt, the major Lithuanian news portal, yesterday published an article by its correspondent Rūta Pukenė about the latest “activities” on the site of the five-century old Vilna Jewish cemetery at Piramónt, which houses the ruin of the old Soviet Sports Palace, surrounded by thousands of still extant graves, amid controversial plans to construct a national convention center using the Soviet building as its core. Many friends of Vilnius have argued forcefully that the city’s interests lie in preserving and restoring Lithuania’s oldest Jewish cemetery, where many rabbinic luminaries still lie buried, and for the convention center project to be moved to another venue in town.
◊
DEFENDING HISTORY’S JOE MELAMED SECTION. Scroll to end to review upwards in chronological order.
◊
[updated]
See DH’s BOOKS SECTION
◊
Pateikiame Rutos Bloštein tarptautinės peticijos vertimą, atliktą Juliaus Norvilos. Originalią peticiją rasti galite čia (prašome pasvarstyti ir apie pasirašymą!). Nuolat atnaujinamą tarptautinio pasipriešinimo statybų projektui santrauką galite rasti čia. Daugiau straipsnių lietuvių kalba — čia.
◊
Per beveik penkis šimtmečius (jau nuo 15 amžiaus), Vilniuje, Lietuvos sostinėje, senosiose Piramónto žydų kapinėse Šnipiškėse buvo palaidoti tūkstančiai Vilniaus gyventojų žydų, tarp jų ir daug iškiliausių žydų mokslininkų, kurių miestas savo laiku buvo pramintas „Lietuvos Jeruzale“. Blogu Sovietų Sąjungos valdymo metu visi šių kapinių antkapiai buvo išvežti ir sudaužyti. Pačiame kapinių vidury buvo pastatyti Sporto rūmai, kurių pamatai buvo išlieti žemėje, sumaišytoje su žmonių palaikais. Daug kapų aplink Sporto rūmus iš visų keturių pusių liko nepaliesti. Tūkstančių palaikai yra ten pat, kur ir buvo palaidoti. Tai šventa vieta, kurioje reikia atkurti kapines ir atminimo vietą, kur galima būtų grąžinti sudaužytus antkapius, kurių dalys dabar aptinkamos visame mieste.
На русском языке
◊
ВИЛЬНЮС—И вновь здесь, в столице Литвы, объявляется конференция, посвященная борьбе с фашизмом и антисемитизмом, без публикации анонса, без единого оратора из числа тех, кто фактически борется с фашизмом и антисемитизмом в стране, без представителей от демократически избранной Вильнюсской еврейской общины (даже давнего редактора газеты “Литовский Иерусалим”, который сам десятилетиями подвергался антисемитизму и всю жизнь боролся с ним). Нет и участников из числа жертв Холокоста. В программу конференции не включен ни один из вопросов, актуальных сегодня на национальном уровне.
◊
Šis vertimas, kuriam autorius davė sutikimą, yra ištrauka iš ilgesnio jo rašinio, publikuoto anglų kalba 2015 m. Michael Maass yra lietuviškosios Tarptautinės krikščionių ambasados Jeruzalėje (TKAJ, angliškai International Christian Embassy Jerusalem arba ICEJ) sekcijos direktorius. Daugiau pastoriaus rašinių portalui „Defending History“ galite rasti čia.
◊
Norėčiau pasisakyti žydų kapinių panaudojimo statybų projektams tema, kuri šiuo metu kelia diskusijas Lietuvoje ir kitose valstybėse. Norėčiau paklausti: ar būtų vykdomi šie statybų projektai, jei tose kapinėse ilsėtųsi katalikai, protestantai arba kiti ne žydai?
◊
Although the scandal caused by statements made by author Rūta Vanagaitė about the partisan leader Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas has by now subsided, the head of the Lithuanian Jewish Community, Faina Kukliansky believes that this is no more than a temporary calm. The English translation of R. Vanagaitė’s book Mūsiškiai should appear soon. Furthermore she has the support of the European Jewish Congress and she has many supporters in Israel.