Tag Archives: Jewish partisans in Lithuania

Germany’s New Brigade in Lithuania (‘Panzerbrigade 45’): Right Near Remnants of the Last Anti-Nazi Jewish Partisan Fort in Europe


[LAST UPDATE (SEE AT END): 20 JUNE 2025]

LAST JEWISH PARTISAN FORT IN EASTERN EUROPEPOLITICS OF MEMORY | GERMANY | FANIA YOCHELES BRANTSOVSKY | LITVAK AFFAIRS

OPINION

VILNIUS—International media has reported in detail on last week’s military ceremonies in Vilnius celebrating the permanent installation of thousands of German soldiers as part of NATO forces in Lithuania, southernmost of the three Baltic republics. The new entity is “Germany’s 45th Armoured Brigade” (Panzerbrigade 45) that is also known as the “Lithuania Brigade”.

The Defending History community is a staunch supporter of the values and security needs of the European Union, NATO, the Western alliance of free and democratic nations, and has from day one condemned the medieval, barbaric February 2022 invasion and unleashing of mass death and destruction upon Ukraine by Putin’s Russian Federation forces. Our support includes reproducing a statement that has appeared for over a decade on p. 1 of DefendingHistory.com (right hand column). As stated there, adherence to the democratic values of the EU and the NATO alliance includes cherishing the free-speech right to criticize: efforts to rewrite Holocaust history by Eastern Europe’s ultranationalist far right; efforts to defame the victims, including Jewish partisans who fought valiantly against the Nazis; efforts to disseminate Double Genocide revisionism in the realm of Holocaust and World War II history; efforts to glorify Holocaust collaborators and perpetrators; efforts to curtail free speech by criminalizing or delegitimizing views that oppose these efforts.

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Posted in A 21st Century Campaign Against Lithuanian Holocaust Survivors?, Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky (Fania Brancovskaja): 1922-2024, Germany, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, Remnants of Europe's Last Jewish Anti-Nazi Partisan Fort | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Germany’s New Brigade in Lithuania (‘Panzerbrigade 45’): Right Near Remnants of the Last Anti-Nazi Jewish Partisan Fort in Europe

Yitzhak Arad, World War II Partisan Hero, Veteran of Israel’s War of Independence, Former Leader of Yad Vashem, Dies at 94



Yitzhak Arad (1926-2021)

Yitzhak Arad (originally Rudnitzky), a native of Svintsyán (Švenčionys, Lithuania, some 90 km north of Vilnius) passed away peacefully in Tel Aviv on Thursday. He was laid to rest Friday at Kibbutz Einat near Tel Aviv. His dramatic career included fighting the Nazis as a bold partisan in the forests of Lithuania, fighting with equal heroism in the air and ground forces that won Israel’s war of independence, rising to brigadier general, becoming a major Holocaust scholar and author, serving as director general of Yad Vashem for two decades (1972-1993), and, in the twenty-first century, becoming the first of a series of Holocaust survivors who joined the anti-Nazi resistance to be publicly accused by Lithuanian prosecutors of “war crimes” (with not a shred of evidence) as part of a massive campaign of Holocaust revisionism and inversion emanating from the state and its lavishly sponsored “genocide center” and “red-brown” commission as well and numerous elite operatives in the media, academia and literature.

The Holocaust revisionist who started the campaign against Arad in 2006 (in an infamous interview in the antisemitic Respublika  representing the state’s “Genocide Center“) is today the nation’s Minister of Defense (!). It was, it turned out, the opening salvo in a years’ long saga that came to include Dr. Rachel Margolis (1921-2015), Ms. Fania Brantsovsky (1922- ), and other heroes of the anti-Nazi resistance regarded as “war criminals” by the far-right revisionist history units financed by East European states and their centers, professors, press maestros and operatives on an industrial scale.

Arad was the first Jewish partisan veteran to be libeled (in 2006) by kangaroo prosecutions of Lithuania’s “history fixing” units  in the effort to revise Holocaust history. One major component of the multilayered effort, epitomized by Lithuania’s state-sponsored “Red-Brown Commission” and its Genocide Research Center, has entailed painting Holocaust victims who survived by joining the resistance as perpetrators and perpetrators (particularly of the atrocities of 1941) as victims. Follow the ins-and-outs in Defending History.

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Posted in A 21st Century Campaign Against Lithuanian Holocaust Survivors?, Double Genocide: The New Form of Holocaust Revisionism & Denial, History, Human Rights, Israel, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Obituaries, Politics of Memory, Yitzhak Arad | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Yitzhak Arad, World War II Partisan Hero, Veteran of Israel’s War of Independence, Former Leader of Yad Vashem, Dies at 94

Joe Melamed, Litvak Champion (Images from the Last Years)



צו די שלשים פון יוסף (יאָסקע) מלמד ז″ל

Memories of Joe Melamed Defending History

MORE ON JOE MELAMED (1924-2017)

DEFENDING HISTORY’S JOE MELAMED SECTION. Scroll to end to review upwards in chronological order.

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Posted in Israel, Joseph Melamed, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Obituaries | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Joe Melamed, Litvak Champion (Images from the Last Years)

State-Sponsored “Genocide Center” Issues Document that is “2017’s Jew-Witch Hunt” Against 95 Year Old Holocaust Survivor Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky



OPINION  |  DOCUMENTS  |   BLAMING THE VICTIMS?  |  DOUBLE GENOCIDE  |  VILNIUS GENOCIDE CENTER  |  ANTISEMITISM

by Dovid Katz

VILNIUS—The following (text below) is a translation from Lithuanian of the 2 March 2017 letter from the state-sponsored Genocide and Resistance Research Center of Lithuania (widely known as the Genocide Center) to a nationalist group that put on this year’s March 11th Independence Day neo-Nazi march, with authorities’ permission, in the center of Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital. The group had complained about Lithuania’s president, Dalia Grybauskaite, having granted an award on February 16th to Lithuania’s oldest Holocaust survivor, Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky, soon to turn 95, for her work in the field of Holocaust education. The president’s office had referred the complaint to the Genocide Center which issued this letter (facsimile of the original below). The correspondence was then read out at a bizarre ceremony that some observers thought bore the hallmarks of a 2017 “Jew-witch hunt” when the Independence day festivities announced a detour to the presidential palace to read out the various letters and condemn Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky, who is the only one of her family to survive the Holocaust precisely because she escaped the Vilna Ghetto in September 1943 and joined up with the anti-Nazi Soviet partisans, the only force seriously challenging Hitler’s rule of Lithuania.

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Posted in A 21st Century Campaign Against Lithuanian Holocaust Survivors?, Antisemitism & Bias, Christian-Jewish Issues, Documents, Double Genocide: The New Form of Holocaust Revisionism & Denial, Dovid Katz, EU, Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky (Fania Brancovskaja): 1922-2024, Holocaust Policies of Mr. Ronaldas Račinskas and the State-Sponsored "International Commission" (ICECNSORL), Human Rights, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, Vilnius, Vilnius's Genocide Center and the Genocide Museum it Manages | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on State-Sponsored “Genocide Center” Issues Document that is “2017’s Jew-Witch Hunt” Against 95 Year Old Holocaust Survivor Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky

Dr. Rachel Margolis Dies in Rehovot; Didn’t Get to See Her Native Vilna One Last Time



רחל מאַרגאָליס (מַרְגָלִית) ז″ל

Rachel Margolis

Vilna, 28 October 1921  —  Rehovot, 6 July 2015


About Rachel Margolis: Shimon AlperovichAlgirdas Brazauskas, Gordon Brown, Abraham Foxman, Steinar Gil, Martin Gilbert, Chen Ivri Apter, Dovid Katz (Y), Francois Laumonier, NCSJGeoff Vasil. UK House of Lords, 5 US Congressmen, 9 Western ambassadors in Vilnius.

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Posted in A 21st Century Campaign Against Lithuanian Holocaust Survivors?, Dr. Rokhl (Rachel) Margolis (1921-2015), Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Obituaries, Politics of Memory, Yiddish Affairs | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Dr. Rachel Margolis Dies in Rehovot; Didn’t Get to See Her Native Vilna One Last Time

SLS’s 2015 Sutzkever Prize: Yiddish Poetry Serving Right-Wing East European Politics?



O P I N I O N

The bizarre saga of the Montreal-based Summer Literary Seminars (SLS) “Jewish Lithuania Sutzkever Prize” continues apace with ever-increasing disrespect toward Abraham Sutzkever and his fellow Jewish partisans who helped liberate Lithuania from the Nazis, and ever more political entanglement with current geopolitical instrumentalization of Yiddish and Jewish causes in Eastern Europe in the context of East-West tensions.

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Posted in "Jewish" Events as Cover?, A 21st Century Campaign Against Lithuanian Holocaust Survivors?, Canada, Foreign Ministries: Holocaust Politics Abuse?, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, Sutzkever Prize in Lithuania, What Do Fake Litvak Games Look Like?, Yiddish Affairs | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on SLS’s 2015 Sutzkever Prize: Yiddish Poetry Serving Right-Wing East European Politics?

Charles Adès Fishman Adds Voice, on Yom Hashoah, to Sutzkever Prize Fracas



O P I N I O N

by Charles Adès Fishman

 

Dear Ed,

I could hardly believe it when I was told that you were participating in the Sutzkever Translation Prize competition as a judge. The Ed Hirsch whose work I’ve read and admired for years—the Ed Hirsch I’ve admired for years—wouldn’t allow himself to be used in a way that will help the Neo-Nazi forces in Lithuania remove the stain of antisemitism from its persecution of individuals who served as Jewish partisans during the Holocaust years.

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Posted in "Jewish" Events as Cover?, Double Games, Identity Theft of Litvak Heritage, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, Sutzkever Prize in Lithuania, United States | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Charles Adès Fishman Adds Voice, on Yom Hashoah, to Sutzkever Prize Fracas

Open Debate, Open Society, and Secret Societies



O P I N I O N

by Dovid Katz

Last Thursday, 3 November, an article I’d submitted to the Jerusalem Post for consideration appeared on the op-ed page (PDF of the print edition here). In democratic societies, sending an opinion piece to a respectable publication, signing it with one’s real name, and opening it (and oneself) to further open debate and discussion are rather standard. As usual, I linked to the article on my Facebook page, expecting some to agree and some to disagree, moving debate forward.

But a number of Facebook Friends who did not react on my page, or any other open forum, did for some reason find it appropriate to join a kind of witch hunt against the article and its author on a page of a “Secret Group” called Lietuva be neonacizmo (Lithuania Without Neo-Nazism), located at: www.facebook.com/groups/135816956486382.

 

The original discussion of 3 and 4 November 2011 is available here. A full English translation is appended below and is also available as PDF.

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Posted in Antisemitism & Bias, Bold Citizens Speak Out, Double Games, Dovid Katz, Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky (Fania Brancovskaja): 1922-2024, Free Speech & Democracy, Human Rights, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Media Watch, News & Views, Opinion, Russian Speakers' Personal Status, What Do Fake Litvak Games Look Like? | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Open Debate, Open Society, and Secret Societies

The Last Jewish Fort in the Forests of Lithuania: Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky Calls for its Preservation



by Dovid Katz

Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky, born in 1922, who lost her entire family in the Holocaust, escaped the Vilna Ghetto several moments before it was encircled by police preparing for its final liquidation on 23 September 1943. Together with Dobke Develtov [update: who passed away in 2012 in Los Angeles], she made it to this underground anti-Nazi partisan fort that was home to fighters aligned with the Soviet partisans. The precise number of inhabitants varied with newcomers and deaths in battle. Fania remembers at one time 99 of 101 were Jewish Vilna Ghetto escapees, at another 101 of 107. An underground bunker like this was home until the fall of Nazi rule in July 1944.

Along with other Holocaust Survivors who resisted — including Yitzhak Arad and Rachel Margolis  Ms Brantsovsky, librarian of the Vilnius Yiddish Institute, has in recent years been the object of a campaign of defamation and harassment in Lithuania.

The antisemitic press has targeted her (January 2008). Armed police came to search for her (May 2008). Prosecutors told the press she could not be found (May 2008). The editor of Lithuania’s main news portal called for her to be tried (May 2009). The mainstream media, citing ruling-party members of Lithuania’s parliament, branded her a war criminal (Oct 2009). And one of the country’s leading associations for human rights (!) demanded that she and other Jewish partisan veterans be ‘sentenced’ for committing ‘a massive slaughter’ (Dec. 2010).

All in the absence of any charge or iota of evidence.

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Posted in Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky (Fania Brancovskaja): 1922-2024, News & Views | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Litvak Studies Institute Protests “Fake Litvak” Game by Politicians; Director Mikhail Iossel Issues Statement



Professor Mikhail Iossel, director of Summer Literary Seminars (SLS) and the newly established Litvak Studies Institute (LSI) released this statement today on the LSI website [archived copy].

 

Litvak Studies Institute Protests Lithuanian Government’s “Fake Litvak” Forum, Calls on State to Halt PR Gimmickry and Reverse Anti-Jewish Policies

Posted in Press — 20 July 2010

For the dwindling number of aged Litvak survivors who grew up in the East European Jewish civilization decimated by the Holocaust, the anti-Jewish and Holocaust-distorting policies of the Lithuanian government in recent years are deeply painful.

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Posted in "Jewish" Events as Cover?, Antisemitism & Bias, Double Games, Identity Theft of Litvak Heritage, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Mikhail Iossel, News & Views, The Great SLS About-Face, What Do Fake Litvak Games Look Like? | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Litvak Studies Institute Protests “Fake Litvak” Game by Politicians; Director Mikhail Iossel Issues Statement

Blaming the Victims? State Agencies & Other Elites Defame Holocaust Survivors



APOLOGIES

THIS PAGE HAS MOVED HERE

NEW URL: https://defendinghistory.com/blaming-the-victims-documents-and-sources/120225

 

 


Posted in A 21st Century Campaign Against Lithuanian Holocaust Survivors?, Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky (Fania Brancovskaja): 1922-2024, Human Rights, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Politics of Memory, Vilnius's Genocide Center and the Genocide Museum it Manages | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Blaming the Victims? State Agencies & Other Elites Defame Holocaust Survivors

Hostages to an Ill-Begotten Theory


by Leonidas Donskis

This essay first appeared in Transitions on Line on 10 October 2008, with the following editor’s note: “Lithuanian authorities in late September closed their two-year investigation into the wartime partisan activities of Yitzhak Arad, a Lithuanian-born Israeli historian and a former head of the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, reportedly on the urging of the European Union and the United States. Prosecutors said there was insufficient evidence to link Arad to possible war crimes committed by Soviet partisans during a 1944 fight with German forces that left many Lithuanian civilians dead. The authorities are still considering whether to put two Lithuanian Jewish women, Fania Brantsovskaya (Brantsovsky) and Rachel Margolis, on the witness stand in connection with the killings.”

It is republished here with Professor Donskis’s permission. For a history of the issue, see our page on the subject of Holocaust survivors defamed by prosecutors.

See more of Professor Donskis’s work in Defending History.


A disturbing tendency has recently appeared in Lithuania. In the words of the eminent scholar of Yiddish Dovid Katz, this tendency may best be described as the “Holocaust Obfuscation movement.” Its essence lies in subversion of the logic and evidence of the Holocaust, whitewashing or at least selectively reading the history of the Second World War and drastically shifting the roles of victims and evil-doers.

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Posted in A 21st Century Campaign Against Lithuanian Holocaust Survivors?, Antisemitism & Bias, Bold Citizens Speak Out, Double Genocide: The New Form of Holocaust Revisionism & Denial, Dr. Rokhl (Rachel) Margolis (1921-2015), Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky (Fania Brancovskaja): 1922-2024, History, Human Rights, Leonidas Donskis, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, Yitzhak Arad | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Hostages to an Ill-Begotten Theory