SYMBOLOGY | THE TEN-EURO “GAON COIN” | ABUSE OF JEWISH PROJECTS | THE “FAKE LITVAK” INDUSTRY | HUMAN RIGHTS
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NEW IN DEFENDING HISTORY
AUTHORS | SECTIONS | SUCCESSES
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DH editor in neo-nazi & far-right imagination
Can eminent Western folks (& Jewish organization heads) be seduced by state medals, junkets & photo-ops to unwittingly compromise historic truth of the Holocaust & the interests of the remnant Jewish communities of Eastern Europe?
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We support Ukraine!
Latest images (17 June 2024) from the cleaned facade that Lithuania’s friends hope will remain morally clean…
Photo at right: 19 May 2024 by DH. June 3rd update: Scaffolding removed. Will the authorities now explicitly keep the plaque off? Or, will the circus of crowds coming to re-affix the plaque glorifying a brutal Holocaust collaborator come back to town this summer (as was the case five years ago, in 2019)?
Shame on the directors, donors, and staff of the “Museum of the Lost Shtetl” that has just had the five minute and six second trailer to Saulius Beržinis’s classic Holocaust documentary on Sheduva removed from Youtube:
RECENT HISTORY OF THE DEBATE
Tale of Two Visions — for Lithuania’s most sacred Jewish site, the Old Vilna Cemetery, where many thousands still lie buried
HUMAN RIGHTS INCLUDE THE RIGHT OF THE DEAD TO BE LEFT IN PEACE
EQUAL RIGHTS INCLUDE THE RIGHTS OF MINORITY CEMETERIES (ESP. MINORITIES DECIMATED BY GENOCIDE) TO ATTRACT THE SAME STATE GUARDIANSHIP AND DIGNITY AS THOSE OF THE CHRISTIAN LITHUANIAN MAJORITY
Ever more antics to avoid having to permanently remove plaque glorifying the Nazi collaborator (or just to delay announcing any decision)? National Library of Sciences in central Vilnius on the eve of the Ides of March 2024. Defending History photos by William Adan Pahl.
Mark Blumberg on the Noreika plaque merry-go-round
Meet our Persons of the Year over the past decade
Please write to members of the “Working Group” on the moral imperative of removing the huge Soviet ruin and lovingly restoring Vilna’s grand Old Jewish Cemetery with its many magnificent stone structures
What would be a magnificent world attraction for a European city — a restored medieval Jewish cemetery reflecting a grand history — seems to elicit deep, primal ultranationalist and antisemitic panic in Vilnius. Time for the prime minister to step in again?
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Latest updates on
‘The Satanic Verses of Lost Shtetl Sheduva’
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Some of the state-sponsored public-space shrines to local Holocaust collaboration in Vilnius in 2023, year of the city’s 700 years celebrations. Top: Vilnius street offensively named for the most tragic day in Lithuanian Jewish history: outbreak of mass murder of helpless neighbors across the land (the Soviets were fleeing the Nazi invasion, not the local Jew-killers). Montage: DefendingHistory.com
See more samples of the same “genre” and the related saga of 2012 (which includes a fine Delfi.lt exposé by a young Lithuanian journalist, and a bold protest staged by nine young Lithuanian human rights champions at an exhibition of the “art” of the envelope maker)
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PROFESSOR MICHAEL SHAFIR
(4 January 1944 — 9 November 2022)
Papers by Michael Shafir
Michael Shafir section in DefendingHistory.com
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On our pages TEN YEARS AGO
It pays to defend history: success stories
Our authors: Who has written for DH during its first dozen years?
Our survivors’ Yiddish oral history archive reaches 670 videos
DH editor in the neo-nazi, far right & fellow traveler imagination
See Defending History’s Fania Brantsovsky Section and some of our videos with dear Fania over the last 25 years
in Lithuanian & in English
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Are South African, Russian or other anonymous tycoons again being duped by slick Lithuanian government operatives?
See also DH sections on Sheduva; Museums; and unique, exclusive recordings of the amazing Christian Lithuanian Yiddish speaker and Holocaust truth teller of Sheduva, Elena Rimdžiūtė (video; clip; article).
LEVINAS MELEE
Composer and pianist Michael Levinas, son of French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, publicly protests Lithuania’s naming an institute in Kaunas for his father. Op-ed in Le Figaro (in English). Interview in Actualité Juive (in English).
“The question on everybody’s mind” is: Will the Levinas Center leaders, staff, sponsors and visitors politely ask that the city of Kaunas now, in its year as “Capital of European Culture” rapidly remove state-sponsored shrines to the local murderers of Levinas’s family and the other 30,000 Jewish citizens of Kaunas? Or will the Levinas Center become one of the “Useful Jewish Idiot Addresses” that are used to cover for current policies of glorification of Nazi perpetrators and defamation of local dissidents?
SEE THE LATEST ON DH’S
LEVINAS CENTER MEDIA TRACKER PAGE
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LEVINAS FOR VETERINARIANS?
PS: Seems that a Levinas-named entity deemed not suitable for Vilnius University’s Faculty of Philosophy, just the “Health Sciences” unit (Medical School & Veterinary Univ.) in Kaunas, during the era of the Ramanauskas Year, the Lukša Year, & Kaunas Capital of European Culture, all of which glorify Kaunas’s Holocaust enablers.
The plaque with bas-relief glorifying the prime minister of Adolf Hitler’s puppet government in Kaunas. That “provisional government” collaborated in the sudden and total dehumanization of the city’s 30,000 Jewish citizens. It still adorns a lecture hall in his name at the city’s Vytautas Magnus University. There is also a matrix of street names and public-space exhibits glorifying the Holocaust’s perpetrators. Will the EU politely call for their removal as Kaunas becomes “Capital of European Culture” or are these the EU’s lax new standards for elementary European values? See the reactions when the Nazi puppet PM was reburied with full honors nearly a decade ago.
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LATEST NEWS
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Yoel Matveyev’s coverage in the Yiddish Forward (Nov. 2021)
DH’s coverage of the Vilnius cemetery saga: Look at it chronologically, or work back from the most recent…
RUTA BLOSHTEIN’S HISTORIC PETITION
COMPELLING WORK BY LITHUANIAN INTELLECTUAL ANDRIUS KULIKAUSKAS
AND A MYSTERY LITHUANIAN ARTIST WHOSE DRAMATIC CARTOONS HAD A PROFOUND IMPACT
THE INDEFATIGABLE CAMPAIGN OF DOV-BER AND CHAYA FRIED OF NEW YORK CITY. MR FRIED’S EARLY ARTICLES IN DH.
MAJOR LITVAK RABBINIC LEADER HORAV ELCHONON BARON SPEAKS OUT TO LITHUANIAN AMBASSADOR IN TEL AVIV. HIS VIDEO AT WESTERN WALL.
DH’s coordination of international opposition. Some highlights
Other Jewish cemeteries in Eastern Europe must be saved from mercenary corrupt clutches of London’s CPJCE and complicit cowardice of US gov’s USCPAHA
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A freedom fighters’ revolt? Hitlerist white-armbanders surround Jewish women being marched to their death. These militias, responsible for deaths of Jewish civilians in forty locations in Lithuania prior to German arrival, are honored by the state as “freedom fighters”….
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In 2012, Dr. Arad reported that Yad Vashem (under Israeli Foreign Ministry pressure) had refused to publish his own paper on Holocaust revisionism in Lithuania and asked for it to appear on the pages of Defending History.
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“Why does Lithuania keep doing this to itself?”
Dr. Arūnas Bubnys, chief historian at the state sponsored “Genocide Center” proudly glorifies June 23rd 1941 (on June 23rd 2020 — pandemic or no pandemic…) under the visages of Holocaust perpetrator J. Noreika (left) and ethnic cleansing advocate K. Škirpa in central Vilnius. Photo: Julius Norwilla
Defending History has been on the Noreika case for 9 years. For years on end our correspondent was lugged into court with kangaroo prosecutions. Scroll down to May 2014 to read more.
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A safe space that genuinely respects your privacy. No log-ins. No passwords. No offers of notifications or pop-ups. Just read what and when you like. Over a dozen years, we have covered under-the-radar issues that went from obscure to the forefront on the international arena.
The East European far right’s clever and lavishly financed campaign to rewrite, revise, and fix history (with the help of well-meaning naive westerners) is finally under serious challenge. Together we can defend history, and along with it, human rights and dignity (of the living and dead alike), equality, free speech, and the values of free society and liberal democracy.
Julius Norwilla conceived this Star of David as a symbol of fellowship for November 1, 2020, the traditional day for visiting cemeteries throughout Lithuania. From left: Andrius Kulikauskas, Ruta Bloshtein, Povilas Birbilas, Vanda Birbilienė and Julius Norwilla stand in front with a bag of stones. Edmundas Kulikauskas and Arkadij Kurliandchik stand on the bank of the Neris with the Sports Palace behind them. Photo: William Adan Pahl.
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MERVYN SMITH MEMORIAL LECTURES
Series of webinars by Dovid Katz on Litvaks, Yiddish, the Lithuanian Holocaust (and the contemporary debates)
Local, international opposition growing by the day
THE BACKGROUND. RECENT BOOKS IN THE DEBATE
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TThe Latest
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5 YEARS AGO IN DH
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For the first time a member of the Lithuanian parliament challenges the wisdom of glorifying (and reconstructing) an ugly Soviet dump that was built on Jewish bones of the centuries. See Kęstutis Masiulis’s new piece in the Lithuanian media. Also, progress in the Vilnius court case is reported in the media, citing comments from Prof. Josif Parasonis. In the report, Turto Bankas (the state’s “property bank”) falsifies history, claiming the unsightly Soviet ruin is outside the cemetery. In fact, the American Embassy confirmed years ago (see point 5) that it “The Sports Palace property indisputably rests in the middle” of the historic cemetery.
Clemens Heni in Times of Israel on recent Yad Vashem furore
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from Dr. Andrius Kulikauskas’s post in BNS and Vakarų Ekspresas
Calls for government to rapidly “do the right thing: take it down”
Thursday 5 September: Crowd glorifying Holocaust collaborator screams “Noreika” as new plaque is affixed on public space in central Vilnius. Photo: J. Stecevičius/LRT
At Aug. 7 central Vilnius rally in support of continued glorification of Holocaust collaborators. Sign at left: “Stop Judaeophile vandalism”. Poster at right asks if it is still Lithuania or already the Northern Jerusalem…
Photoshopped version of painting by F. Reshetnikov depicts several boys observing what seems like a Jewish-LGBT event from around the corner. Text at top reads “Škirpa and Vėtra [Noreika] are heroes of Lithuania”. The lower text depicts a rooster (“gaidys” in Lithuanian, used as a homophobic slur) and is labeled “Šimašius”, i.e., the current Mayor of Vilnius Remigijus Šimašius who recently led efforts to remove public glorification of two Holocaust collaborators. Text at bottom: “Let’s defend the heroes of Lithuania! Rally under the Mayor’s windows, by the monument of King Mindaugas. August 7 (Wed.), from 18:00 to 19:30.”
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Vilnius mayor Remigijus Šimašius
NEXT QUESTION:
The mayor will hopefully soon speak out on fate of Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery, slated to become a convention center, that would damage Vilnius’s brand for generations to come. Vilnius native Ruta Bloshtein’s petition now has over 46,000 signatures from every part of the world.
But what about Škirpa Street in Kaunas, which is slated to be “Capital of European Culture” in 2022?
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LEV GOLINKIN IN THE WASHINGTON POST
EFRAIM ZUROFF IN THE JERUSALEM POST
ROBERT ROZETT IN ISRAEL JOURNAL OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS
GRANT GOCHIN IN THE TIMES OF ISRAEL
IVAN KATCHANOVSKI ON UKRAINE’S UPA & OUP
UPDATES: HOW THE “OFFICIAL JEWISH COMMUNITY” WAS USED AND ABUSED
RAMANAUSKAS: A FIVE YEAR SAGA
WAS THE US EMBASSY AGAIN DRAGGED INTO THINGS THAT DON’T REFLECT AMERICAN VALUES?
Defending History’s take: “The people of Chicago, and its proud Lithuanian and Litvak communities, should not have foisted on them a monument glorifying an alleged Holocaust collaborator who led a Hitlerist militia in the early days of the Holocaust, a monument that was overwhelmingly rejected by the New Britain, Connecticut city council one year ago. And, most certainly not without a free, public and transparent process of dialogue and consultation including Holocaust survivors and their families, as well as scholars and institutions representing a diversity of opinions. A one-year moratorium is called for to enable such a process to proceed with dignity.”
DEFENDING HISTORY MONITORING TEAM WAS ON THE SCENE FROM 12 TO 3 PM ON 28 APRIL 2019
Thousands (in groups of 25) were misinformed by guides’ prepared text assurance that convention center is with permission of “European Jewish Community in 2016” (!). Soviet kitsch was praised effusively in latest ruse to turn hated Soviet dump into “a national treasure”. Rabbi S. J. Feffer confronts one of the groups with a heartfelt speech of protest informing visitors of the “wanton theft of our forefathers’ graves” and blessing those who will help stop the travesty from moving forward.
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Ruta Bloshtein’s petition approaches 46,000
SEE MORE
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Verdict came down on 27 March. Since then: utter silence from the US, UK and Israeli embassies in Vilnius, and from the “Red-Brown” Commission (which has affiliations with the Genocide Center) and its foreign members representing Yivo and the American Jewish Committee. But on April 3rd, the World Jewish Congress issued a major statement, to some extent avoiding the current issue of state glorification of Holocaust perpetrators via street names and plaques.
At 1 PM on Wed. March 27th, a Vilnius Administrative Court judge read out the court’s ruling dismissing the query of US resident Grant Gochin over Lithuania’s state glorification of Nazi collaborator Jonas Noreika, active during the Holocaust in the region where Gochin lost around 100 relatives. The court said Mr. Gochin had no material interest, ruled that the state-sponsored Genocide Center had answered his query completely, without bias, and without abuse of power, in effect further enshrining in law an EU/NATO state’s glorification of Holocaust collaborators and perpetrators via the financing of ultranationalist and far-right history centers and departments determined to preserve the national hero status of Holocaust collaborators. Whenever government or municipal officials are asked about the numerous street names and plaques honoring collaborators, the invariable answer is that it is all in fact a matter for the experts at the Genocide Center.
Mr. Gochin’s academic specialist, Dr. Andrius Kulikauskas was on hand along with attorney Rokas Rudzinskas. Of the Genocide Center’s staff, only historian Dr. Arūnas Bubnys turned up, sitting in the small gallery surrounded in part by first and second generation Holocaust survivors who turned out to hear the verdict that the Western embassies, human rights organization and official (state-sponsored) Jewish community thought not worth sending an official representative to hear. By contrast the local Vilnius Jewish Community had two observers on hand.
UPDATES: Genocide Center releases statement; official Jewish community issues reply.
JTA report is picked up by some Israeli papers but not one major American media outlet, general or Jewish… Why is that?
A moment before the courtroom clock strikes 1 PM: Genocide Center’s chief historian Dr. Arūnas Bubnys (front row third from right) was the only GC official to come and hear the verdict.
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Dr. Andrius Kulikauskas, moments before his historic address before the Vilnius court on state-funded Genocide Center’s policy of glorifying Holocaust collaborators. The center’s “decisions” are cited by high officials as “justification” for street names, university hall plaques and other public-space state-funded glorifications of Holocaust collaborators. Around 96% of Lithuanian Jewry was massacred in the Holocaust.
Andrius Kulikauskas will go down in history not only as the hero of the day but as the true patriot of Lithuania whose love for his country is not infected by Holocaust obfuscation and the glorification of Holocaust perpetrators but by a pursuit of simple historic truth. By contrast, the Genocide Center’s shameful performance illustrated, as ever, why the government should not be using taxpayer or EU funds for a far-right ultranationalist Holocaust-obfuscating entity that disparages the freedom of Lithuanian citizens to have diverse opinions (by dictating fake history as per the Soviet playbook) and continues to damage Lithuania’s name in the world (East European democracies need state glorification of Holocaust collaborators like a hole in the head).
Evaldas Balčiūnas, whose 2012 article brought the case to international attention, was in attendance. Icing on the cake was the Genocide Center’s demand that the videographer leave at the outset. So much for government sponsorship of an open and transparent operation. There were close to 20 observers, mostly Vilnius Jewish personalities there in an individual capacity, including Prof. Pinchos Fridberg, who figured in a New York Times article on the subject last September. Elected Vilnius Jewish Community head Simon Gurevich, committed elsewhere, nevertheless made two brief appearances to show moral support for those who stand up to glorification of collaborators and to the community members in attendance. The VJC hosted Dr. Kulikauskas on Jan 14th.
Fania Brantsovsky (left) with the late Dr. Rokhl Margolis (1921-2015) in Vilnius in 2007
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Photo gallery of the event
2018 lead banner: “WE KNOW WHO OUR NATION’S HEROES ARE”. The “sanitized” event in central Vilnius featured a lead banner glorifying six Nazi collaborators, five of them deeply implicated in the Lithuanian Holocaust. The torchlit march, the day’s final event, made its way from Vilnius’s most sacred Catholic shrine down through the Old City, culminating at a street named for one of the collaborators who had advocated “only” ethnic cleansing of the country’s Jewish minority in 1941. PHOTO: © DEFENDING HISTORY.
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I respectfully call on members of the Lithuanian Parliament (Seimas), to read pp. 33-34 in my father’s book, The Truth and Nothing But the Truth (Gefen Publishing, Jerusalem & New York 2006), and to reconsider the tragically misguided proposal to name 2021 for Juozas Lukša (Luksha), a participant in atrocities committed against the peaceful Jewish citizens of Kaunas (Kovno) in the last week of June 1941, when massive local violence broke out before the invading German army had set up its authority.
I would like to emphasize that in his books, my father Alex (Alter-Henoch) Faitelson (1923–2010) provided a meticulously researched description of those tragic events of the Lithuanian Holocaust. As a professional auditor who worked for a major Israeli bank for over twenty-five years, he adhered to very strict rules also in his studies of the Holocaust. He repeatedly encountered and tested — corroborating or rejecting — details of testimonies of his former comrades in the anti-fascist struggle and Holocaust survivors more generally. In the same book, he included chapters “Forgery, Communist Style” (chapter 20), “The Tricks of Memory” (21), and “Everyone’s a Hero” (22), titles that speak for themselves to anyone in the field. In fact, these are part of a larger five-chapter section called Legends and Fables.
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Seven years ago, this journal’s opinion section cheered the decision to finally, for the first time, honor one of the real Lithuanian heroes of the Holocaust era, the Rescuers, also known as Righteous of the Nations, in Vilnius. While praising the decision to so honor the inspirational Ona Šimaitė (1894–1970), Defending History lamented the decision to do so out in a suburb just north of the city. The name of our editorial in 2013 was “Vilnius Street Name Proposed for Rescuer Out in Boondocks; But Please Remove Nazi Collaborators from City Center!”
As ever, the Defending History community was pleased to play the role of catalyst while much more powerful and wealthy forces eventually came around to taking up the cause. In the end a streetlet was named for Šimaitė at the technical “edge” of the city center, not very traversed, but progress nonetheless.
Naturally, Defending History was there to report on the street name’s unveiling in 2015.
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This is the story of Dr. Raphael L. Hatulay and what he has witnessed over the years between the goings on with what we shall call, ASHKI and the Republic of Fenwick. During this process Professor Hatulay has lost almost everything he worked for in life, but he is still fighting for what is right and just. This story deserves to be told. You deserve to hear it.
“What is the stated mission of a non-profit institution?” the Public Health professor asked his students nearly five decades ago.
Depending on the agency, the answers provided from the students differed about the stated mission: from feeding the hungry to educating the masses to caring for the elderly.
“Wrong. Wrong, Wrong! Lies, lies, lies!” retorted the professor, who was also the director of a major governmental agency. “The main purpose of charitable organizations and nonprofits is one thing, and one thing only, continuity and survival, no matter what and no matter who gets in the way. Nothing else matters!”
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According to Lithuanian media reports, the nation’s parliament (Seimas) will be declaring the year 2021 to be dedicated to the memory of Juozas Lukša (Daumantas).
Let us assume for the sake of argument that the identification of Mr. Lukša (Luksha) as one of the brutal murderers of defenseless Jewish neighbors in an infamous photo of the Kaunas Garage Massacre of June 1941, best known from Joseph Melamed’s 1999 Crime and Punishment, published by the Association of Lithuanian Jews in Israel, is erroneous. Then, that the reference to Mr. Lukša in the text (p. 38) in a listing of perpetrators (known from a half century of testimonies from the survivor community), and a photo with other alleged collaborators (p. 105), are likewise mistaken. And that the information on the Association’s website, posted during Mr. Melamed’s lifetime, is also in error.
SEE UPDATES
Let us even grant that there is no current courtroom-grade proof for the details of the following text from Holocaust survivor Alex (Alter) Faitelson, in his classic memoir The Truth and Nothing But the Truth: Jewish Resistance in Lithuania (Gefen Publishing House 2006, p. 34). It is a text that includes the author’s recollection from after the war: Lukša’s “photograph was found and shown to witnesses who were interrogated. They all confirmed his participation in the torture of Jews in the garage” (Lithuanian translation). Incidentally, in 1993, Mr. Faitelson was awarded a certificate of honor by Lithuanian president Algirdas Brazauskas. He was not some “enemy of Lithuania” who spent his time making up stories about people. He was a Holocaust survivor, heroic member of the resistance and escape, and renowned memoirist.
Dr. Arūnas Bubnys, chief historian at the state sponsored “Genocide Center” proudly glorifying June 23rd 1941 under the visages of Holocaust perpetrator J. Noreika (left) and ethnic cleansing advocate K. Škirpa in central Vilnius. Photo: DefendingHistory.com
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VILNIUS—The good news is that the press conference at the Seimas (Lithuanian parliament) this morning featuring two members of parliament was in the end a small fringe event by the far right, including a renewed attack on Holocaust survivor and resistance hero Dr. Yitzhak Arad, one of the Jewish partisan veterans defamed and harassed by local prosecutors for some years. The evening event in central Vilnius had a dismal turnout of a few dozen people. Both events were dedicated to the glorification of June 23rd, the day the mass murder, injury, plunder and humiliation of Lithuanian Jewry by local Hitler supporters, most prominently the LAF (“Lithuanian Activist Front”) got underway, in a multitude of locations, most lethally Kaunas, before the arrival of the first German forces. Although it is universally accepted by serious historians that the Soviet Army was fleeing Hitler’s onslaught (Operation Barbarossa, the largest invasion in human history), the local far right continues to spew the narrative that this was actually a “rebellion” that “drove out” the Soviet army. (See Defending History’s coverage of previous years’ events and debates, an introductory reading list on the history, and the new English translation of extensive survivor testimonies.)
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VILNIUS—In November 2018, Defending History raised some questions about a crowdfunding campaign for a new book by Professor Christoph Dieckmann, a longtime member of the Lithuanian government’s “red-brown commission,” in partnership with bestselling author and Holocaust truth-teller Ruta Vanagaite. The article is reproduced below unchanged for speed of reference.
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PEACEFUL DEMO PLANNED AT LITHUANIAN EMBASSY IN TEL AVIV ON FRIDAY 24 JAN, 11 AM; FB; HEBREW POSTER; LITH. PRESIDENT CANCELS ISRAELI TRIP
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Defending History’s take:
The proposal is not in line with Poland’s earlier debacle, but infinitely worse. However, Lithuania should not be held accountable for the rants of a single member of parliament (though it is disturbing to note the utter silence from his committee members including the one “official Jewish parliamentarian”).
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Who were the people who managed to disregard the ubiquitous government warnings and the abundant anti-Semitic propaganda and refused to remain passive onlookers? Those who went on to rescue their Jewish neighbors from the fate of persecution and murder during the Second World War? Jews were rescued by people of various educational background, beliefs, ages, and professions. Each of them had to make this not-at-all easy decision by themselves, led by no one but their conscience. Upon seeing such direct and overt brutality, these courageous people were simply unable to act in any other way.
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This comment appeared in Mémoires en Jeu (Memory at Stake), no. 9, (2010).
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In recent years, a number of eastern EU and NATO member states (plus Ukraine) have been constructing components of their official(and protected-by-law) national narratives on heroes who were collaborators, or even perpetrators in the Holocaust on the grounds that they were “anti-Soviet heroes.”1 These countries indeed had to face two Soviet occupations (1939/1940–41 and 1944/45–1991), and the occupation by Nazi Germany (1941-1944/5). The “liberating” state was also the author of major crimes such as repressions, deportations, forced labor and executions, and the statutes of post-Soviet Europe lacked a text on the crimes of communism. The ensuing moral problem is as follows: while these States would have legitimate heroes who struggled for freedom against dictatorial Soviet domination, they also honor those who participated in the Holocaust and even criminalize criticism against them.
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by Dovid Katz
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Many in the local Lithuanian Jewish and the international Litvak communities have responded with some shock to the news that the Lithuanian government’s official “Year of the Gaon of Vilna and Jewish Heritage” has been launched by a handsome, shiny 10 Euro Coin that plonks a symbol beloved in recent years of neo-Nazis (and prominently used in their new projects) onto a Jewish Menorah. The symbolism strikes some as evoking the idea that the largely vanished Lithuanian Jews and their language make for one of the “cute Jewish toys” for the ultranationalist camp to exploit in its PR outreach to unwitting foreigners.
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VILNIUS—Who’s afraid of DefendingHistory.com? Yet again, a treatment of Holocaust history and Jewish issues in Lithuania involving government funding of a journalist’s trip coincides with the “two frightening words” Defending History not being mentioned, in spite of the journal’s being one of the central addresses for these matters for a decade now, entailing publication of several thousand reports over the decade, including dozens of authors and subjects. There has been no such hesitation in reports in the New York Times, BBC and other general outlets. Are readers of Jewish publications not entitled to the same standards of inclusion of views and news?
Today’s extensive and important article by Raphael Ahren on some of the most pressing Lithuanian-Jewish issues appears in The Times of Israel. The Defending History community’s comments appear in an informal posting on the journal’s Facebook page. An unedited paste-in follows below.
Who’s afraid to mention the words Defending History?
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Congrats to Raphael Ahren on his historically important article in today’s Times of Israel: https://www.timesofisrael.com/graves-guilt-and-genius-inside-lithuanias-struggle-with-its-checkered-past/.
Its most singular achievement is perhaps the sterling quote from Prof. Yehuda Bauer, dean of Holocaust scholars in Israel and far beyond, a powerful retort to the nonsense that those who disagree with the Lithuanian government’s (small but powerful and overfinanced) ‘history fixing units’ are ipso facto non-scholars, scoundrels, and all the rest.
As ever, journalists who do not reach out to interview ANY of the dozen or so DefendingHistory.com authors in Lithuania, and whose articles don’t mention the two words Defending History are sometimes prone to being manipulated by their government hosts (on state sponsored trips) to the detriment of at least some aspects of genuine open debate. Just a few examples from today’s article:
(1) While the debate over the degree of local complicity in the Holocaust is important, it should not obviate the need to at least deal with the massive campaign to export to the West a revised view of the Holocaust altogether (the Double Genocide or Two Holocausts theory). The primary documents are the Prague Declaration, and our rejoinder, The Seventy Years Declaration, signed also by eight incredibly brave Lithuanian parliamentarians (none of them were reached out to for the article). In other words, there is a serious battle over the wider history that remains unmentioned. There is a larger issue on the extent to which the Holocaust “fixing” policies of a whole range of East European states are ipso facto the 21st century incarnation of Holocaust Denial per se. See for example:
https://archive.jewishcurrents.org/the-double-genocide-theory/. For more academic papers on these subjects please see: https://defendinghistory.com/holocaust-and-antisemitism-studies-papers-and-reviewsin-academic-venues.
(2) The ongoing need for state apologies to the Holocaust survivors (or their families) defamed for posterity as potential war criminals in history books and on the web (it was Mr. Ahren himself who penned one of the best articles on that back in 2009, and now — wholly unmentioned). Of course these kangaroo charges were themselves a function of Double Genocide thinking, and the need to “find” supposedly “equivalent genocide perpetrators” among the handful of Holocaust survivors. Please see Mr. Ahren’s terrific 2009 article: http://www.operationlastchance.org/PDF/p_8_lith_2.pdf.
(3) The article cites a government official’s mistatement of DH editor Dovid katz’s opinion, claiming the view that “all” anti-Soviet heroes are being called Holocaust collaborators! This is a scurrilous misstatement (and locally very dangerous and already led to a new death threat). It was wrong of the journalist to quote it without also speaking to DK and the Defending History team to be able to cite the named person’s response.
(4) On the question of the Old Vilna Jewish cemetery, there are still thousands of graves extant (found by ground radar) on all four sides of the Soviet dump slated to become the national convention center. A year ago, a New York Times journalist was not afraid to ask also the views of the democratically elected head of the Vilnius Jewish Community too (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/30/world/europe/lithuania-genocide-museum-jews.html)
But perhaps the next journalist to look into all this will ask gov. officials just one question: Had this been a 500 year old Christian Lithuanian cemetery, would they be building a national convention center with graves all around, or would it be lovingly and respectfully restored as a national and international treasure?
(5) The Defending History team happens to agree entirely with Mr. Ahren’s findings that daily life for Jewish people in Lithuania is fine! Again, “what it is that is the issue” goes unmentioned. East European antisemitism differs markedly from its western counterparts. See for example:
https://isgap.org/flashpoint/west-is-west-east-is-east-the-specific-east-european-incarnation-of-antisemitism/
or. more recently: https://defendinghistory.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/PDF-of-DK-on-Holocaust-Inversion-ilovepdf-compressed.pdf.
(6) The discussion of the parliament’s decision to name 2020 “for the Jews” needs to include the history of the decision, i.e. a reaction to much criticism of 2019 being named for an alleged Holocaust collaborator, one for whom a monument was slated to go up in New Britain Connecticut last year (see: https://defendinghistory.com/category/new-britain-connecticut-plans-to-glorify-alleged-nazi-collaborator?order=desc); this year the monument went up in Chicago (see: https://defendinghistory.com/category/debates-on-adolfas-ramanauskas-vanagas?order=desc). The head of the Jewish Agency has spoken out: https://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Herzog-underscores-obligation-to-remove-Chicago-monument-honoring-Nazi-collaborator-591319).
INCIDENTALLY, Defending History’s response to the naming of 2019 for an alleged Holocaust collaborator was to start naming years for LITHUANIAN RIGHTEOUS who risked everything to just do the right thing.
Our 2018 choice: https://defendinghistory.com/malvina-sokelyte-valeikiene-is-defending-historys-2018-person-of-the-year/92536
Our 2019 choice: https://defendinghistory.com/jonas-paulavicius-1898-1952-is-defending-historys-2019-person-of-the-year/97205
We are confident that history will render a true verdict on who, during these years, was the TRUE friend of Lithuania. . .
(7) Mr. Ahren writes that he is consciously staying away from internal Jewish community rifts which are sadly a part of the scene in many places. That is in itself a fine position to take, but here it seems to function as an excuse for shutting out entirely and failing to ALSO interview the democratically elected head of the Vilnius Jewish Community, Simon Gurevich, which represents the vast majority of Lithuanian Jews, and who has taken a DIFFERENT stance on the very issues dealt with in this article (most famously the fate of the old Vilna Jewish cemetery slated to become a national convention center, with the support of the government-supported non-democratic official Jewish community; see: https://defendinghistory.com/democratically-elected-leadership-of-vilnius-jewish-community-shows-consistent-moral-clarity-on-old-vilna-jewish-cemeterys-fate/97300).
(8) Finally, let us hope that future journalistic quests will reach out to the Jewish Lithuanian citizens who have over the years actually spoken out with inspirational courage. They do not deserve to be omitted from a foreign journalist’s quest to learn the various sides of issues that they have given so very much to express themselves, even when not convenient to their careers or status. To name just a few: Moyshe Bairak, Roza Bieliauskiene, Ruta Bloshtein, Milan Chersonski, Prof. Pinchos Fridberg, Simon Gurevich, Leon Kaplan, Sania Kerbelis, Rachel Kostanian, Arkady Kurliandchik, Chona Leibovich (Leibovičius), Prof. Josif Parasonis… When journalists fail to do so, it can mean that “the names of the right Jews to talk to” have been provided by the same government whose policies are being critically discussed. . . In other words, a state apparatus supplies its “own list of dissidents” for the benefit of journalists. And, last but not least, there are the many inspirational non-Jews who have earned over decades of blood, sweat and tears the moral right to be heard by foreign journalists on these topics. Here in Lithuania they include: Vytenis Andriukaitis, Evaldas Balciunas, Saulius Berzinis, Andrius Kulikauskas, Fiokla Kiure, Julius Norvila, Ruta Ostrovskaya, Prof. Liudas Truska, Linas Vildziunas, If you have a moment, do look up their essays on the pages of www.DefendingHistory.com AUTHORS page is at: https://defendinghistory.com/authors)
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Postscripts:
(1) Lithuania is a wonderful place and great to visit, see our page for some ideas: https://defendinghistory.com/litvak-tourism
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(2) The ongoing debates with a small and powerful government unit do not equate to being “against” a country. They do concern important issues on which there are various opinions. Defending History’s summary of the currently outstanding Lithuanian-Jewish issues is an updated version of the original that was hammered out in close consultation with the late Dr. Shimon Alperovich, the long-time beloved head of the Jewish community. It’s at:
https://defendinghistory.com/7-solutions
Perhaps one day a journalist will come and at least ask these seven questions and even dare to report that for the state’s “Jewish issue units” to come to terms with them would cost so very little — and do so very much good. . . .
A good week to all!
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Five years ago, I wrote about the alleged connections of Adolfas Ramanauskas to the persecution of Jews in Druskininkai. Following publication of the Lithuanian version, the English version appeared here in Defending History in 2014. The connections are based in the first instance on Ramanauskas’s own memoirs, published in post-Soviet independent Lithuania, where he boasts that he served as leader of “the rebels’ squad” during the precise days and weeks of June and July 1941 when these “rebels” of the Lithuanian Activist Front (LAF) were in fact unleashing humiliation, plunder, violence and indeed murder against Jewish neighbors (the Soviet army was escaping Hitler’s invasion, not these white-armbanded LAFers). Following upon Ramanauskas’s own memoir and boast came research into the actual police records of the summer of 1941, as well as the postwar Soviet war crimes trials’ transcripts.
When writing that first article in 2014, my goal was not to find or prove something directly compromising. I was simply disturbed by the obvious collision of this heroic myth and its historical circumstances. It was part of my series of articles in Defending History, starting in 2012, that was launched by my essay “Why does the State Commemorate Murderers?”.
LATEST MEDIA:
Algemeiner; BBC; Independent; Simon Wiesenthal Center; Telegraph.
RAMANAUSKAS: A FIVE YEAR SAGA
But then, in late 2017, the Seimas (parliament) of the Republic of Lithuania declared 2018 to be the Year of Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas. Indignant at the uncritical worship, Dr. Efraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s department of East European affairs, brought a copy of my article to the members of the Seimas and was condemned without them even attempting to read it. During that period, I published a second, follow-up article focused on the moral issues.
Successful resistance to the plans of the Genocide and Resistance Research Center of Lithuania to erect a monument to Ramanauskas in his native city of New Britain, Conn., were enabled exactly by the facts mentioned in the 2014 piece (that saga can be followed in Defending History). One year ago, the City Council of New Britain “just said No.”
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VILNIUS—On Friday, April 26, 18:00-18:20, Dr. Andrius Kulikauskas, curator of the Captain Jonas Noreika Museum, Archive and Forum, will give the final talk at the conference “The Territories of Interaction of Aesthetics, Art Philosophy and Art History: Intercultural Fields of the Functions of Representation”, organized by Prof. Antanas Andrijauskas at the Lithuanian Cultural Studies Institute, at Saltoniškių St. 58, Vilnius.
Dr. Kulikauskas will be speaking in Lithuanian on “How to Forego, Through Dialogue, Monumental Images of Those Who Voiced the Will of the Lithuanian Nation in 1941 But Committed Crimes Against Humanity”.
His talk will be followed by an hour of open dialogue on two questions: