The English version of a clandestine plan (dated 21 Nov 2009) to thwart honorable restitution of prewar communal Jewish property to the Jewish Community of Lithuania was leaked to this website today. Incredibly, the plan was proposed by the ruling party in the country’s parliament without informing the government’s long standing negotiating partner — the Jewish Community of Lithuania.
The plot is diabolically simple: to dispense with the communal restitution under negotiation for over a decade (and agreed by every other new-accession EU state), and to ensure that not a single Holocaust Survivor sees any benefit in his or her lifetime. Instead, funds would be poured into ‘morbid tourism’ projects, particularly the white elephant follyesque rebuild of the Great Synagogue (destroyed during and after World War II) as part of the ‘Disneyland Vilna-Ghetto Dead-Jew Tourist Park’ which is anathema to the country’s living Jewish community.
The most offensive part of the document is the passage claiming that the living remnant Jewish survivor community does ‘not have any direct connection with the victims and communities’. This is a diplomatic reformulation of the antisemitic canard that the Jewish community of Lithuania is not legitimate. The claim is part of the wider strategy of pretended friendship toward foreign Jews and prewar Jewry that goes hand in hand with disdain for living local Jews.
Text of the document in English translation. A July 2009 article written in a similar spirit by the former director of the ‘Litvak Foundation‘ [!] claimed that two-thirds of Lithuanian Jews are ‘aliens from the East’. Report here.
Norway’s ambassador to Lithuania HE Steinar Gil has emerged as a Baltic region champion of human rights, at a time when the Lithuanian government continues its gestures of support for the March 11th neo-Nazi marchers (parallel to Latvian leaders’ stout defense of the March 16th Waffen SS march in Riga). Speaking at a March 19th forum on ‘European and Lithuanian Values’ at the Lithuanian parliament, Ambassador Gil remarked for the record: ‘Every foreigner in Lithuania noticed this march, where the participants were shouting “Lithuania for Lithuanians”. We were shocked.’ The ambassador also pointed out politely that fifty parliamentarians had signed a petition to ban the Baltic Pride gay-rights parade. He asked: How many had spoken up against the nationalist march? He added that every person with respect for herself or himself and for her or his country should condemn this kind of manifestation. Others who have spoken up include Irish ambassador HE Dónal Denham; UK ambassador HE Simon Butt; and Lithuania’s sole Liberal member of the European Parliament, Prof. Leonidas Donskis.
Dr Yitzhak Arad won a National Jewish Book Award for his new 700 page volume, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union (University of Nebraska Press).
The annual Uzgavenes festival, celebrated throughout Lithuania, again featured costumes and behavior making fun of – and perpetuating the worst stereotypes of – Roma and Jews (‘and monsters’). Roma and Jews comprise two of the country’s smallest and weakest minorities. Most of both communities were murdered during the Holocaust by the Nazis (with massive voluntary participation in the killings by locals). Today, progressive forces continue to live in hope that political, academic, legal, religious and cultural opinion makers in the country will rise to the occasion of explaining the essence, evil and dangers of such rampant racism unconvincingly disguised as the majority’s ‘national ethnographic tradition’. See below at 2008 (→ 6 Feb) for 
Dr Efraim Zuroff, founding director of the Israel Office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, has been awarded the Order of Prince Trpimir with Ribbon and Star, by Croatian president Stjepan Mesić. The president’s signed certificate cites Dr Zuroff’s ‘outstanding contribution to the fight against historical revisionism and reassertion of the anti-fascist foundation of the modern-day Republic of Croatia and to establishment of good relations between the Republic of Croatia and the State of Israel’. The award was presented at midday on Monday 1 February 2010 in the palace of the president of Croatia in Zagreb. Sonja Biserko, president of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights, was also honored by the Croatian president. Associated Press report 
The Shabad statue in Vilnius’s old town (wartime territory of the Vilna Ghetto) was defaced in a paint attack. 
