Rabbi Elchonon Baron calls on Lithuania’s President & Presumptive PM Not to Enable New Coalition Government that Includes Openly Antisemitic Party

Posted on 8 November 2024 by Defending History

OPINION | ANTISEMITISM | LITHUANIA | RABBI BARON SECTION

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by Rabbi Elchonon Baron

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Honorable Gitanas Nausėda, President of the Republic of Lithuania

Below is a letter I sent to Mr. Gintauatas Paluckas this morning from Vilnius. We stand tonight on the 86th anniversary of Kristallnacht in a country, Lithuania, that witnessed the annihilation of 96.4% of its Jewry just eight decades ago. In the name of civilization and a free and modern Europe, unshackled by ancient endemic antisemitism and all the allied ills that come with it, I implore you not to allow the formation of a government that includes the openly antisemitic “The Dawn of the Nemunas” party. It is a slippery and dangerous path for any European country to take, and greatly risks arousing the centuries-old European demon of antisemitism in Lithuania and beyond. It will not be understood by anyone in the world any differently.

Has Europe Forgotten So Soon?

Open Letter to Presumptive Lithuanian Prime Minister Gintautas Paluckas:

I am writing from Vilna just as a bona fide European Pogrom on Israeli soccer fans plays out in Amsterdam, and a day before the 86th anniversary of Kristallnacht. Just over twelve hours ago I heard the shocking news that you and your Social Democrat party have invited “The Dawn of the Nemunas” headed by the avowed court-confirmed antisemite Remigijus Žemaitaitis (who has claimed that the Jews have killed the Lithuanians—not the reverse) to join your coalition to govern Lithuania, and I was too distressed to respond immediately.

I implore you to listen to my perspective as an American Jew who is attached to Lithuania, and appreciative for its saving my late father, of blessed memory, from the Holocaust. I began visiting this side of the iron curtain in 1990, and my first visit to Lithuania was in 1998, when I lead the Baranovich Heritage Tour, the first ever yeshiva heritage tour, visiting the places of our great yeshivas in Lithuania and Belarus, then newly liberated, and accompanied by my late father Rabbi Leib Baron, of blessed memory, and another three elderly rabbis who had lived and studied there.

Here are my primary vivid recollections of that tour: As we were a large group (fifty) and included elderly rabbis, we were visibly Jewish, a rare site in those days. We spent the Sabbath in Vilna, walking as a group for quite a bit from the hotel to the dinner hall and the synagogue. Wherever we went we experienced people catcalling, pushing us, throwing stones and screaming anti-Jewish slogans from passing cars. In one memorable instance, a car stopped in the middle of the road and the occupants actually stepped out to do a full Hitler salute! By the time we arrived at the Ninth Fort in Kovno, massacre site of 50,000 Jews, and we saw children sitting atop the huge memorial (how did they get up there?) taunting us, our nerves were completely frayed from our experiences. My late mother, of blessed memory, a normally regal, reserved and shy person, lost it completely. When the museum clerk asked for a large fee for using our own video camera, she began shouting uncontrollably (the only time any of her children had seen her angry): “First they murder all of us and then they ask the survivors for a fee to photograph the site”?

For the last five years I have been promoting Jewish heritage in Lithuania for both the living and buried Jews in Lithuania, with mixed results, engaging all levels of Lithuanian government. Wherever I go in the world, people tell me: “Why are you bothering with Lithuania, they are the biggest antisemites of all, as they were the worst collaborators in murdering 96.4% of their Jewish population, with only a few hundred Jews remaining in Lithuania to tell the story”? I patiently explain how times have changed, how I rarely experience antisemitism, and how the younger generation is eager to learn the truth and engage with their Jewish past. I also say how I personally know many Seimas members, including you, good people who want to act with integrity and honesty.

European antisemitism over the centuries has had many faces, during the crusades and the inquisition we were heretics, in the middle ages we were accused of poisoning wells, during the Chmielnitski massacres we were the enemy and eighty years ago we were the communists set to destroy the fabric of our countries. Today it’s a genocide libel, as our fellow Jews in Israel are fighting a just, defensive war against brutal barbarians who care less about their civilians than the Israelis do, and eye Europe as their next target.

Mr. Paluckas, do not underestimate the message you are sending the world from EU Lithuania: Hew-hating, Jew-bating, and Jew-bashing is OK. You are seriously endangering the lives of the tiny remnant of Jewish people in the world, who almost eighty years after the Holocaust, have still not regained our pre-Holocaust numbers.

Please withdraw your invitation to Remigijus Žemaitaitis immediately.

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