OPINION | MUSEUMS | VILNIUS | LITVAK AFFAIRS
◊
OPINION
◊
VILNIUS—For several decades, the Defending History community has been providing commentary on Jewish and history related museums in Lithuania and the wider region, primarily in our Museums section, initiated nearly eighteen years ago. Here in Vilnius, we have endeavored to give voice to sectors of modern Jewish (and sometimes non-Jewish) life whose views have had no other channel, especially since the closure, over a decade and a half ago, of the Jewish community’s long-beloved quadrilingual Jewish newspaper, Jerusalem of Lithuania, that was home to open and vigorous debate for decades, under the inspired editorship of the late Milan Chersonski. Ultimately, it was replaced by a PR type website dedicated to one view only, that of the tiny clique in control of the tens of millions of euros in restitution funding that has excluded the interests of today’s Jewish community, and its healthy diversity of views.
With the recent Lithuanian elections barely out of the way, and the ruling right-wing Homeland Union Conservatives the undisputed losers, the ultranationalist right is losing no time in pressing ahead aggressively with the Double Genocide “red-equals-brown” agenda, reverting to one of the movement’s original slogans: “United Europe — United History.” For pro-tolerance and liberal forces, the profoundly undemocratic message implied is that a united Europe has to also be united (i.e. have one opinion) on questions of history, and that Double Genocide and its central document, the 
Milan Chersonski (Chersonskij), longtime editor (1999-2011) of Jerusalem of Lithuania, quadrilingual (English-Lithuanian-Russian-Yiddish) newspaper of the Jewish Community of Lithuania, was previously (1979-1999) director of the Yiddish Folk Theater of Lithuania, which in Soviet times was the USSR’s only Yiddish amateur theater company. The views he expresses in DefendingHistory are his own. This is an authorized English version (updated by the author) by Ludmilla Makedonskaya (Los Angeles). 
Holocaust survivors from Lithuania, and their families and advocates, are reporting feelings of “shock and betrayal” at “unbelievable reports” that Yad Vashem might again be lending legitimacy to the Lithuanian government sponsored “red-brown commission.” These accounts derive from a BNS (Baltic News Service) report today that appeared in various Lithuanian media, including