OPINION | YIDDISH INSTRUMENTALIZED FOR EAST EUROPEAN STATE PR | OLD VILNA JEWISH CEMETERY AT PIRAMÓNT: THE SAGA OF 2015-2025 | EARLIER OPPOSITION |  2023-2024 “WORKING GROUP” ON VILNA CEMETERY | LIST OF MEMBERS | MOUNTING OPPOSITION TO NEW “MUSEUM PROJECT” | USCPAHA  (UNITED STATES COMMISSION FOR THE PRESERVATION OF AMERICA’S HERITAGE ABROAD) | THE CPJCE (COMMITTEE FOR THE PRESERVATION OF JEWISH CEMETERIES IN EUROPE) | THE AJC (AMERICAN JEWISH COMMITTEE) | THE CER (CONFERENCE OF EUROPEAN RABBIS) | THE GWF (GOOD WILL FOUNDATION) | CEMETERIES & MASS GRAVES | HUMAN RIGHTS

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OPINION

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VILNIUS—There was sadness and shock in the international Litvak community this week as news spread that famed Lithuanian  mezzo-soprano Judita Leitaitė, a professor at the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre, was featured in the program of the free 18 May 2026 concert arranged to promote the project to situate a new national convention center in a Soviet ruin that lies in the middle of the Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery where many thousands still lie buried. The Soviets pillaged all the stones, but left untouched the graves that were not under the building of the “Sporto Rumai” building.

There is widespread consensus that a half millennium old cemetery of the country’s ethnic and religious majority would not be subjected to this fate. There is added sensitivity deriving from the fact that the many thousands of buried humans have no descendants to defend the graves their families purchased in perpetuity because of the Holocaust.

Salt on the wound was provided by Ms. Leitaitė’s singing a Yiddish song (no. 2 among the 15 on the program) at an event promoting a project that has led to mass international and local Jewish pain and protest. The name of the song, Ikh hob dikh tsufil lib (‘I love you too much’) is written in the program in German orthography rather than transcription of the Yiddish. The lack of respect for Yiddish even as it is abused was painful to the small handful of Jewish observers in the audience. The song was written for a musical comedy on New York’s Second Avenue. It was a far cry from a genuine Litvak folksong or a poet’s creation put to music. But what would its author Chaim Towber and composer Alexander Olshanetsky (both duly credited in the printed program), who came up with it in 1933 for a light comedy, think of it — and their names — being instrumentalized in faraway Vilnius in 2026 to promote the situating of a national convention center in the middle of an old Jewish cemetery where many thousands still lie buried?

Ms. Leitaitė’s contributing “the Yiddish” for the campaign to desecrate the Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery provides a counterpoint to the Lithuanian Embassy in London flying her in back in 2016 to “commemorate the Shoah in Lithuania”. Many years earlier, in 2000, she was brought to London to feature at the International Festival of Jewish Music.

See Defending History’s chronology of the Vilnius cemetery saga from 2015 onward, and its section on the instrumentalization and manipulation of things “Yiddish” as political and PR cover for Holocaust revisionism as well as contemporary antisemitism.