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A breathtaking icon of the human will to survive, this is where 100 Jewish escapees from the Vilna Ghetto set up their partisan fort in the battle against Nazi forces and their local collaborators.
See Defending History’s 2010 report on the ‘Jewish Partisan Fort’, which the late Jewish veteran of the anti-Nazi partisans, Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky (Brancovskaja, 1922-2024) showed to substantial numbers of of visitors over some three decades, including diplomats from the American, British, Canadian, French, German, Irish, Norwegian and other embassies in Vilnius. Her last wish was that it be preserved for future generations.
Ireland’s Ambassador Dónal Denham (left) and UK Ambassador Simon Butt visit the Jewish partisan fort in the forests of Lithuania, learning of its remarkable history in the annals of anti-Nazi resistance from survivor and veteran of the Jewish partisans Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky (c. 2009). Photo: DefendingHistory.com
Fania passed away in 2024 at age 102, but her videos showing every corner of the Jewish partisan fort in the forest are still there. Now, with thousands of German soldiers arriving next door in a NATO deployment to defend Lithuania, it would surely be of the highest benefit to soldiers’ continuing education and respect for the victims of the Holocaust for the fort to be lovingly restored. This is an opportunity for Germany and for NATO.
June 2025
Remembering on Monday June 23rd 2025 — Monday June 23rd of 1941
An appeal to Lithuania’s democratic parliament (the Seimas) not to allow its premises to become the home for yet another attempt to glorify the first Holocaust-era murderers of Lithuanian Jewry in the genocide that left some 96% of Lithuanian Jews annihilated?
“Beautiful, modern, democratic Lithuania needs this kind of far-right Holocaust revisionism, glorifying the perpetrators, like a hole in the head.”
In the opinion of virtually all Lithuanian Holocaust survivors interviewed over three decades, June 23rd 1941 was — for the victims and survivors, in the eyes of the targeted population — the onset of the Lithuanian Holocaust. Mass murder by men who put on white armbands (the LAF — ‘Lithuanian Activist Front’) killed thousands of Jewish neighbors before the Germans even came or set up their authority (see samples of survivor testimonies). They were, of course, not all violent thugs. There were the LAF’s intellectuals in Berlin preparing the texts and leaflets calling for the ethnic cleansing of Lithuanian Jewry (see LAF leaflets; history).
Now, as 23 June 2025 approaches, a group of parliamentarians, academics and far-right activists are setting up a ‘collegium’ to try to turn these murderers into ‘national patriots’. Confident of their ability to sell far-right revisionist history to naive Westerners, they have even announced an English edition of their wisdom for the benefit of Western embassies. This is the last thing beautiful, modern, democratic Vilnius needs. The latest in Defending History:
Leonidas Donskis answers Prof. Girnius from the grave:
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NOW IN ENGLISH TRANSLATION:
UPDATES
Former foreign minister, cofounder of the “collegium” announces June launch date for the drive to glorify the LAF murderers of thousands of Lithuanian Jewish citizens. Plans include lavish English-language publications intended to persuade major Western embassies in Vilnius and assorted foreign entities. Back in 2012, he was the author of the infamous Hitler-Stalin “moustache remark” when he attacked six inspirational Lithuanian parliamentarians who signed the Seventy Years Declaration. In 2010, the Lithuanian Jewish Community protested his antisemitic tirade. In 2012, the Social Democrats, inspirationally led by Vytenis Andriukaitis, fought valiantly for the truth of history. See reports from the period, and especially Dr. Andriukaitis’s reply to the then foreign minister, and a historic parliamentary intervention by Andriukaitis and Algirdas Sysas. For Defending History’s take on the issues per se, please see our reply to the recent article that launched the latest attempt to kosherize and glorify one of Adolf Hitler’s most “successful local mass-murder machines” of 1941. The victims were all civilian Jewish citizens of Lithuania. Thousands were murdered before the Germans even came or took control. We call on genuine friends of beautiful, modern, democratic Lithuania to speak up loud and clear against the impending travesty. See also dozens of survivor testimonies of the white-armbanders / LAF’s “accomplishments” for Lithuanian history, and English excerpts from their pre-Nazi invasion leaflets.
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Mid June 2025 in Vilnius:
On Yivo’s 100th:
Book launch:
[Links to purchase the book, and to reviews & comments: on DH’s Books in the Debate page.]
Documentary film launch:
Boris Maftsir’s new documentary film on the Lithuanian Holocaust (subtitles in English) at the Forum Cinema on Savanorių, Wednesday 18 June at 7 PM. Registration.
While in town:
New Museum of Litvak Identity. The Green House (Pamėnkalnio 12). Litvak folk art exhibition at the National Picture Gallery.
Best place to get information on all that is going on in town: Visit the Jewish Cultural and Information Center at Mėsinių St. 3 in the Old Town.
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5 June 2025
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30 May 2025
Rašella Galinienė, elected head of the Jewish community of Shavl (Šiauliai, northern Lithuania) just says No! to 25 (!) bronze-on-concrete sculptures plonked right on top of the hundreds of Yánishok Jews buried in this mass grave — without consulting the nearby living Jewish communities, or bothering to think whether they would be doing this unilaterally if it were a mass grave site of the nation’s ethno-religious majority…
Is a mass grave the right place for these?
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Spring 2025 News
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Chelm or Vilna? Restitution-fueled ‘Lithuanian Jewish Community’ (so-called ‘fake election quango’) closes Vilnius’s only synagogue on main Passover event with no warning, issues statement effectively yanking the title ‘rabbi’ from Vilnius’s one resident rabbi (of the last 30+ years). Report. Background.
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Passover invitation: Rabbi S. J. Feffer invites all who wish to come to his Passover seyder on Saturday night 12 April at 9:30 PM at the Narutis Hotel on Pilies St. in Vilnius’s Old Town (ground floor, hall at rear). Everyone welcome, free, no reservations needed…
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Jan. 2025
IS THIS REALLY HAPPENING?
The Defending History community, which has expressed profound admiration for recent major progress of Lithuania’s state Jewish museum (“Vilna Gaon Museum of Jewish History”), is saddened that the museum has chosen to commemorate this year’s International Holocaust Commemoration Day by a 30 Jan. event featuring revisionist historian Dr. A. Bubnys, director of the Holocaust “fixing” Genocide Center (who proudly poses with placards of leading Holocaust collaborators J. Noreika and K. Skirpa). Without including a single independent historian or Lithuanian champion of truthtelling. Let alone a single Jewish member of the panel, let alone families of survivors and victims. We call on the museum to cancel this ill-conceived event. An insult to the victims and survivors and their families. The Gaon of Vilna is turning in his grave.
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Top: Invite to Vilnius museum’s Holocaust Remembrance Day event. Bottom: The featured speaker back in 2020 addressing a far-right / neo-Nazi rally flanked with placard glorifying two brutal Holocaust collaborators (one “on the ground” and the second in his published program in 1941 for the ethnic cleansing of the country’s Jewish citizens).
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Jan. 2025
From the Saga of Žemaitaitis
A publicly antisemitic party is in the governing coalition of one of the Eastern EU member states for the first time, raising deep concerns both near and far
Some of the ins-and-outs from Nov. 2024 to Jan. 2025
His party is in the governing coalition of an EU state
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Andrew Higgins in the New York Times on inclusion of party of avowed antisemitic MP Remigijus Žemaitaitis in Lithuania’s new governing coalition; Defending History is cited. As PDF.
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Nov. 2024
Two takes on Vilnius’s new Museum of Culture and Identity of Lithuanian Jews:
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In the second half of 2024…
FROM NEAR:
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AND FAR:
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22 September 2024
אַ ליכטיקן גן⸗עדן, טײַערע פאַניטשקע
22 May 1922 — 22 September 2024
Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky took thousands of students and visitors from around the world to see the Jewish Partisan Fort where she and another hundred Vilna Ghetto escapees valiantly fought the Nazis. Her last wish: that the fort be preserved and restored.
Beloved icon of Vilna Yiddish culture, educator, librarian, mentor to thousands from around the world who came to immerse themselves in Yiddish in one of its historic capitals.
Hero of the Jewish partisan resistance in the forests of Lithuania, Fania’s last wish was that the Jewish Partisan Fort, where she and another hundred Jewish escapees from the Vilna Ghetto fought valiantly against the Nazis, be preserved and restored. It is now up to major Jewish and world heritage organizations to make that happen.
Fania’s family, heirs and students deserve a formal state apology for the shameful campaign of prosecution and defamation (chronology) against her and the other Jewish partisan veterans, all in the spirit of “Double Genocide” Holocaust revisionism (video sample). Follow the history to see also the inspirational leading role in Vilnius of then Irish ambassador to Lithuania Dónal Denham; also Austria’s Andrea Wicke, Norway’s Steinar Gil, UK’s Simon Butt, USA’s John A. Cloud. All in support of Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky and Dr. Rachel Margolis (1921-2015), the two women Holocaust-survivor heroes of the anti-Nazi resistance defamed by media, prosecutors, major local academics, the “Genocide Center” and the “Red-Brown Commission”…
For close to two decades, Fania was librarian of the Vilnius Yiddish Institute at Vilnius University. When the institute was closed, the thousands of books she had meticulously catalogued became suddenly unavailable to students and readers. Brokenhearted as she was at the institute’s closure (she had been librarian from day 1, in 2001), her first thought was that all its Yiddish books must rapidly be incorporated into a living, functioning Vilnius library.
25 July 2024
Vilnius Jewish Community Leads Peaceful Demonstration Against Project to Desecrate Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery with ‘Memorial & Museum Complex’
27 June 2024
21 & 23 June 2024
PLAQUE GLORIFYING K. ŠKIRPA, ‘ARCHITECT OF ETHNIC CLEANSING OF LITHUANIAN JEWRY’ (DURING THE HOLOCAUST) IS MOUNTED IN CENTRAL VILNIUS ON FRIDAY 21 JUNE
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17 June 2024
Latest images (17 June 2024) from the cleaned facade that Lithuania’s friends hope will remain morally clean…
5 June 2024
“Please just announce that the Noreika plaque, glorifying a brutal Holocaust collaborator, will NOT reappear on the facade of the central Vilnius Library of the Academy of Sciences after completion of the building’s renovations. It causes so much pain to the families of Holocaust survivors, and so much unnecessary damage to Lithuania’s status. Time to throw systemic antisemitism and state glorification of Holocaust collaborators into the junkyard of the last century’s horrors. And move onward together in the spirit of the European Union, NATO, and the free world.”
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)?
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The plaque was removed a year ago in the run-up to July’s NATO conference (pretext: “renovations of the facade”). The builders’ sheets have finally come down, but the scaffolding is still up. When the plaque was removed for renovations, Delfi.lt reported one year ago that the director of the National Library of Sciences, whose Noreika facade has so damaged Lithuania’s standing, gave the plaque to a far-right, pro-fascist youth group “for safekeeping” and that “the sign will be put back when the renovation works are completed.”
America’s ambassador to Lithuania, H.E. Cara McDonald, mentioned Noreika by name in her historic Jan. 2024 statement that included the words: “I will continue to speak out strongly against the glorification of individuals who are known and documented to have participated in the Holocaust. This is part of the definition of antisemitism.”
20 May 2024
10 May 2024
Five Minutes & Six Seconds:
The Satanic Verses of Sheduva, Lithuania?
Our take:
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:
If this really is some kind of “copyright dispute” the Museum of the Lost Shtetl will rapidly re-post the trailer on Youtube with its own proposed copyright data. Or is this a case of the museum wanting to bury forever from the public domain these moments from the documentary that it itself commissioned — and with it, the truth about the Holocaust and the memories of its last witnesses in town?
The five minute trailer on Yom HaShoah. The saga. Sheduva in Holocaust history over the last few years. A foreign journalist’s report withdrawn, allegedly after threats.
6 May / Yom HaShoah 2024:
Please spend five minutes and six seconds watching the youtube trailer for Saulius Beržinis’s blocked film
25 years ago, Elena Rimdžiūtė, a Christian Lithuanian townswoman, told us, in Litvak Yiddish, what happened during the Holocaust in her town while remembering her murdered neighbors by singing their beloved Yiddish folksongs (translation of the excerpt in youtube ‘description box’). Entire interview here.
26 April 2024
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22 April 2024
Could the “plot line out of a horror movie” be true? Yet another drive to obtain “Orthodox permission” for converting a Soviet dump in the middle of Lithuania’s oldest, greatest, Jewish cemetery to a modern building with toilets and lights and masses of visitors to museum-grade exhibits? The American Jewish Committee’s point man again “coming to the rescue” by allegedly offering a “substantial sum” to the Conference of European Rabbis (CER), previously a staunch opponent of desecration, in return for stitching it all up via a new commission to which they would appoint Orthodox members who would merrily sign on? With money from where? From the “Good Will Foundation” restitution funds deriving from the religious property of the murdered Jews of pre-Holocaust Lithuania. The AJC man will no doubt get even more medals and shmontzes. Ah, but then the power of truth shows itself again in a way that revealed the whole of it for history. One member of the commission dissents with the deepest of honesty, courage and integrity, via eloquent documents for the records of history.
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15 April 2024
this Monday, 22 April, 9 PM to late, at the
Narutis Hotel, Pilies g. 24 (ground floor, hall at end of corridor)
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April 2024
On the future of the Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery: To date, just one member of latest “international commission” on the cemetery stood up with integrity for the cemetery’s dignity, and could not be swayed by junkets, banquets, photo-ops, translations, medals and trinkets. His statements for history on the process and on the content. Who are the other members? Will any of them — especially the “religious” Jewish representatives — ever speak out?
Real Lithuanian tradition rabbis have spoken out with simple integrity. Statement of four yeshiva heads, and of Rabbi Elchonon Baron.
Tale of Two Visions — for Lithuania’s most sacred Jewish site, the Old Vilna Cemetery, where many thousands still lie buried
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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
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March 2024
Welcoming Springtime in Vilnius with Ever More Repairs at Library of Sciences
BUT STILL NO ANNOUNCED DECISION ON FUTURE OF CENTRAL VILNIUS SHRINE TO HITLER COLLABORATOR J. NOREIKA. A SHRINE WITH A RECENT STORIED HISTORY. ONE OF A NUMBER OF PUBLIC-SPACE SHRINES IN VILNIUS GLORIFYING LOCAL HOLOCAUST PERPETRATORS.
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.
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Critics ask: Is it all to avoid making the bold decision to leave the plaque and bas relief of Noreika away from the building’s facade and right on the junkpile of Hitlerist paraphernalia — where it justly belongs?
“These repairs, approaching the one-year mark, are the Vilnius answer to Chris Christie’s Washington Bridge repair scheme”…
Plaque was temporarily removed on eve of last July’s successful NATO conference (according to mainstream media, it was given to far-right hate group Pro Patria for “safekeeping”). New American ambassador speaks out with unambiguous moral clarity at the start of 2024. Nu? What keeps the president, prime minister and mayor of Vilnius from proudly announcing that just like Soviet junk, public space shrines to Holocaust criminals have no place in the public space of EU and NATO capital cities. One mayor once took down its predecessor plaque (alas, very temporarily). On Vilnius’s 700th last year, Defending History assured our readers that Gediminas, creator of Europe’s first truly from-the-start multicultural capital, was crying out from the grave.
Meanwhile, hated relics of Soviets’ architectural (and human) barbarism are all correctly coming down, with the one exception of the one on the Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery, where demolition would entail the “danger” of restoring Lithuania’s most storied Jewish cemetery in the onetime Jerusalem of Lithuania.
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February 2024
America’s new ambassador in Vilnius, HE Kara McDonald, makes a dramatic entrance that will go down in history, citing glorified Holocaust perpetrators Krikštaponis and Noreika by name, in first major interview:
“I will continue to speak out strongly against the glorification of individuals who are known and documented to have participated in the Holocaust. This is part of the definition of antisemitism.”
New US ambassador in Vilnius HE Kara McDonald
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AMBASSADOR MCDONALD’S FIRST MAJOR CHALLENGE: Hope rising that the ambassador can succeed to persuade authorities to truly join West’s sensibilities in their imminent decision on…
DefendingHistory.com photo by William Adan Pahl
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Can a handful of antisemitic, ultranationalist, Holocaust-revising elites continue to stymie Lithuania’s progress?
The day will come, when the nation’s educators, journalists, parliamentarians and cultural leaders will appreciate who were the true friends of Lithuania in the 2020s. . .
Coming back? Plaque with bas relief of the Holocaust collaborator. Photo: DefendingHistory.com.
For a decade and a half, the Defending History community has been calling for an end to glorification of Holocaust perpetrators. See DH’s sections Perpetrators Glorified; J. Noreika. The far-right’s argumentation, that “Double Genocide” means that all perpetrators can also be heroes has been propagated for a quarter century by the “Red-Brown” Commission. It’s best-known iteration is on video, concerning the state’s attempts to prosecute anti-Nazi resistance heroes Fania Yocheles Brantosvsky, Rachel Margolis, Joseph Melamed, and others; official apologies to their families remain a vital issue. Defending History is proud to have brought these travesties to the world’s attention, and to have supported to the hilt the last survivors. Our community is certain that this constitutes a great service to the future of the delightful, democratic EU/NATO state of Lithuania, whose valiant people deserve much better than their taxes going to glorify Holocaust killers, or to rewrite history in the spirit of the far-far right’s ultranationalism, racism and antisemitism.
Jan. 2024
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Meet our Persons of the Year over the past decade
Dec. 2023
We wish all our readers
Happy Holidays, Happy Chanukah, Happy Christmas, Happy New Year 2024!
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Dec. 2023
Nov.-Dec. 2023
“History will hold to account each and every member of the Working Group, including addiction to junkets, photo ops, translations, grants, honors and glories, for enabling the cruel humiliation of the graves of tens of thousands of Jewish citizens of Vilna over half a millennium whose cemetery has no true local descendant-defenders because of something called the Holocaust. Who knows, more of the Working Group will end up with classy state medals too. But their names will remain in the accurate history until the end of days.”
“Cemetery restoration” planned for one of Lithuania’s most sacred Jewish sites?
The frightening imagined image that so disgusts antisemites in town: the idea that A Cemetery Is A Cemetery, that the Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery is the Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery, not a convention or memorial center, not a museum or fun & recreation park…
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?
Were allegedly compromised groups possibly manipulated to provide “Jewish cover” for de facto cemetery destruction? Focus on AJC, CPJCE, LJC. Previous steadfastness of Conference of European Rabbis (CER) now unclear as “clear new statement” awaited. Follow the dramatic saga in Defending History.
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QUESTION for the Working Group members: Would any of this be happening to a half-millennium old Christian or Lithuanian national cemetery where many thousands still lie buried?
QUESTION for the planet’s Litvak rabbis and Litvak leaders: Who will be among the First Ten to publicly say something along the lines of “Sorry, guys, but the middle of the Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery is just no place for a museum or other renovated Soviet monstrosity. A cemetery of any people is for those buried there, to lie in peace in the plots purchased freehold by their relatives, with nothing but restored gravestones on top. Not just Jewish law, it’s part of human rights of all people, dear khévre.”
☰ Who will be the second? ☰
Autumn 2023
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August 2023
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Summer 2023
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“Forbidden” scenes in the film Petrified Time have become known informally as The Satanic Verses
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For a decade and a half, Defending History has been proud to stand with the inspirational heroes of modern Lithuania: the bold truth tellers of history (of all personal backgrounds). In summer 2023, documentary film maker Saulius Beržinis, after near-miraculously filming the last witnesses to the Holocaust in Sheduva (Šeduva), finds that powerful forces (including a Brussels macher, a Zurich billionaire, various officials, and Vilnius’s most ellexist law firm) all stacked up to prevent these ‘satanic verses’ of the film entering the public domain of Western civilization. Defending History intends to ensure that the Sheduva truth, a microcosm of the East European Holocaust, is not suppressed — museum or no museum. And that master documentarian Saulius Beržinis is acclaimed for his achievements rather than be subjected to strongmen-commanded, billionaire-financed campaigns of destruction actuated via fancy law firms. A major Hollywood documentary master has been brought in to do a replacement film that will presumably not ruffle the local, national or regional feathers.
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16 June 2023
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Lithuanian cartoonist Voluvak on whether in the internet age film footage of real significance for the historic record of Western civilization can be eaten up (“catch and kill”) before ever seeing the wider light of day.
May 2023
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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
Meanwhile, an antisemitic commemorative envelope (featuring “numerous crowds of Kaunas Jews” allegedly greeting the Red Army in Kaunas during World War II) “updated” for this year’s celebration of Vilnius’s 700th birthday, purchased in Vilnius Old Town’s central tourist souvenir district (Pilies St.) on Easter Sunday, 9 April 2023:
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)
April-June 2023
After the Defending History led campaign to thwart the “national convention center on top of the Vilna Jewish cemetery” culminated in success, powerful forces continue to try to “save” the unsightly ruin of the Soviet Sports Palace built in the cemetery’s center, this time around via plans for a “Jewish museum.” See the latest in Defending History.
Reminder: There is not one Jewish museum, Jewish center, or Jewish institution on the planet built on top of an old Jewish cemetery, among other reasons because this is strictly forbidden by Jewish law, and any such misguided endeavor would be ipso facto shunned or boycotted by traditional religious Jews, and many other people, Jewish and non-Jewish, in solidarity with their millennial sensibilities, and in harmony with universal humanistic respect for the rights of the deceased to be left in peace and respected, which is a right now enumerated by the US Congress and the European Union, among others, as part of universal human rights.
March-April 2023
March 2023
March’s Marching Season in the Baltics: Latvian & Lithuanian worshippers of Hitler’s henchmen continue to be gifted the centers of Riga and Vilnius…
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February 2023
16 February 2023:
Happy 105th Independence Day, Lithuania!
We all join in celebrating February 16th 1918, just 105 years ago, that ushered in the successful interwar republic. Classic image of the Jews of the shtetl Dorbyán (Darbėnai, northwestern Lithuania) in 1928 celebrating the tenth anniversary of the happy day so cherished by all the peoples in the land. . .
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Also: In 2018, to honor the 100th anniversary of independence, we established the (still slow moving) Mini Museum of Jewish Life in Interwar Lithuania
February 2023
January 2023
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New Year’s Day 2023
Evaldas Balčiūnas (photo: Defending History)
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TO ALL OUR READERS:
Happy New Year 2023!
December 2022
and
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November 2022
We mourn the sudden and untimely death of our dear colleague, mentor and teacher
(4 January 1944 — 9 November 2022)
PHOTO: CAROLE LEMEE
The entire Defending History community mourns the untimely sudden death of the great Holocaust historian, who was editing his book on the East European revisionist campaign, and its many Western and Jewish nochsheppers, in his final months. Inspired by Randolph L. Braham (1922-2018), among others, Professor Shafir’s papers covering the whole swath of East European governments’ huge investments to “fix” the Holocaust made him the pioneer of the academic and intellectual resistance to state-sponsored Double Genocide revisionism. May his completed book and all his other writings soon be made accessible to scholars and the public alike. His works will live on and in time come to be recognized for their successful exposure of the vast and elaborately financed efforts to obfuscate the Holocaust.
November 2022
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London Jewish Chronicle reports on last wish of 100 year old Holocaust survivor and heroic partisan veteran Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky: Preserve for posterity Europe’s last Jewish fort from Holocaust times! (background; 100th birthday and list of videos)
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John Oxley’s ‘non-Critical’ piece in ‘The Critic’ Magazine: Some PR for Europe’s most antisemitic and far right revisionist museum — Vilnius’s ‘Genocide Museum’ that turns Hitlerist Holocaust perpetrators into ‘gallant heroes’. The DefendingHistory.com community views of the museum.
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October 2022
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Sept. 2022
Vilnius Cinderella Comes to the Ball (belatedly, and in Berlin)
Sept. 2022
Defending History Turns 13
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Aug. 2022
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We join Fania in calling for preservation of Europe’s last Jewish partisan fort in the forests (“Fania’s Fort”), where 100 Jewish escapees from the Vilna Ghetto lived and fought the Nazis during the Holocaust as part of the anti-Nazi resistance. The fort in the forest, which should become a major Lithuanian, Baltic, UNESCO, Jewish Heritage and European Union site to be cherished, is rapidly disappearing because of far-right history revisionists in high positions.
August 2022
July 2022
See G. Rossolinski-Liebe’s authoritative study of Bandera’s Hitlerist history and the racist, fascist leader’s inspiration of hundreds of thousands of murders of Polish and Jewish civilians. Erika Solomon’s update in the New York Times
Defending History was ahead of curve; see from earlier years Bandera section and some of Dr. Rossolinski-Liebe’s earlier writings in Defending History; DH’s Collaborators Glorified section for the wider context of the issue in contemporary Eastern Europe (more details on Sections page)
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February–August 2022
Civilized World Condemns Putin’s War of Barbaric Mass Murder in Ukraine
The Defending History community joins in calling for immediate restoration of peace and security for all the people of Ukraine, condemning unequivocally the savage and barbaric invasion — and rain of death and destruction — by a neighboring big power, led by our century’s most dangerous and deranged warmonger dictator.
As a small gesture of spiritual solidarity, our Yiddish Studies team has constructed a modest new collection of videos of Ukraine’s last Yiddish speaking survivors. Ukraine alone spans every modern dialect of the language.
June 2022
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Professor Klibansky is a major contemporary scholar of the history of Lithuanian Jewry. His book on Lithuanian yeshivas has just come off the press…
June 2022
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27 May 2022
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May 2022
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Background on Genocide Center: DH section & page; review of its museum in Tablet
Background on “International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupational Regimes in Lithuania” (ICECNSORL or, as dubbed by Vilnius diplomats for brevity: The Red-Brown Commission): DH page & section
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April 2022
March 11 and 16:
Even this year, Latvia and Lithuania permit city-center far-right, collaborator-glorifying marches that idolize Holocaust collaborators:
Feb. 2022
Will it reveal its “top secret” multimillion-dollar donors of a massive new building and complex in town? Transparency is paramount when it comes to Jewish history on ground zero of the East European Holocaust.
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).
Someone has to defend history and ask the hard questions. That’s us. Thank you for your support.
Jan. 2022
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“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?
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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.
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Takes on Kaunas 2022 in the wake of Nazi shrines abounding in town (and the university): Arndt Beck; Thomas Pfanne; Dovid Katz
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.
Jan. 2022
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Dec. 2021
Testimony identified Mr. Lukša as one of the participants in the beheading of Rabbi Zalmen Osovsky of Slabodka (before the arrival of German forces) and as a participant in the Kaunas Lietukis Garage Massacre.
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Dec. 2021
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Dec. 2021
Survivor testimonies and linguistic and cultural interviews, all in Yiddish, videographed mostly in situ from 1990 to 2020
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Oct. 2021
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26 Sept. 2021
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Sept. 2021
Defending History Turns 12
Founded on 6 Sept. 2009. Emailed circulars and reports from May 2008 were then uploaded making for a record starting in 2008, A dozen years of posts provide a unique record.
ON OUR PAGES
Contributions in the United States are now fully tax-deductible via the new nonprofit Preserving Yiddish and Defending History.
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Sept. 2021
Lithuania’s prime minister Ingrida Šimonytė “just did the right thing” (Getty Images)
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During mid-August lull, many were caught unaware (reports in DH, DH Updates, Algemeiner Journal, JTA)
Rumors (still uncorroborated) spread of plans by usual “gov. Jewish unit” for another “quisling and UJI [‘useful Jewish idiot’] conference” to cloud the issues and cover for “slow-motion rollback” of PM’s bold decision. That trick had (Sadly) worked back in 2007-2008 when leading American Jewish scholars were lavishly brought to a “committee” to cover for building “just the second green building” on top of the cemetery (still known locally as the “D.E. Fishman Building”), on the “understanding” that no more would ever be desecrated with commercial projects…
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26 Aug. 2021
SEE MORE IN BOOKS
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25 August 2021
Question: Is this how he wants to o down in the 700 year and counting history of Vilna (Vilnius/Vílne/Vilna/Wilno)?
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18 August 2021
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16 August 2021
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RUTA BLOSHTEIN’S HISTORIC PETITION
MAJOR LITVAK RABBINIC LEADER HORAV ELCHONON BARON SPEAKS OUT TO LITHUANIAN AMBASSADOR IN TEL AVIV. HIS VIDEO AT WESTERN WALL.
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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Augusat 2021
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“Nearly a decade later it’s more relevant than ever”
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As a matter of Interest…
for example
August 2021
Playwright Marius Ivaškevičius’s in-depth videotaped interview with DH editor Dovid Katz:
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August 2021
Prof. Alan Dershowitz
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July 2021
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June 2021
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But did they even bother to meet with Ruta Bloshtein, author of the international petition calling on the Lithuanian government to move the national convention center project away from the sacred old Vilnius Jewish Cemetery? Her office, in the Judaica section of the national library, is a short walk from their gov. meetings. Petition has 53,500 signatures to date. History of the US taxpayer-funded commission’s role in the affair. Meanwhile international opposition to desecration of the old Jewish cemetery grows apace. And on the Holocaust? Not a word of critique of state projects to glorify the local perpetrators on the eve of the 80th anniversary of 23 June 1941, when the Lithuanian Holocaust broke out. Land of “tweeted photo-ops fix all”. . .
23 June 2021
When “white-armbanders” and LAF followers began to injure, plunder, humiliate and (in 40 locations) murder thousands of Jews across Lithuania (before arrival or taking-of-control by the first German forces). And who will honor the real Lithuanian heroes of 1941 — the amazing, inspirational folks who saved a neighbor from the LAF and the Hitlerist hordes?
Will the state and its “history” units finally honor the victims or again perpetuate the far-right pro-fascist false history that this was some minor crossfire in a “great revolt against the Soviets”? The Soviets were fleeing Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa, the largest invasion in human history — not the local white-armbanded Jew killers.
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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Another “conference to paper it all over” adorned by “useful Jewish academics” from far and wide?
6 May 2021
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Yitzhak Arad (1926-2021)
Holocaust revisionist who started the campaign against Arad in 2006 (in interview in the antisemitic Respublika representing state’s “Genocide Center”) is today the nation’s Minister of Defense.
Arad was first Jewish partisan veteran to be libeled by kangaroo prosecutions of Lithuania’s “history fixing” units attempts to revise Holocaust history. Major effort was to paint victims as perpetrators and perpetrators as victims. Follow the ins-and-outs in Defending History.
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.
For decades he was the leader of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. But when, in retirement, the Lithuanian assault got underway, he felt betrayed and abandoned by Yad Vashem (and after some early support) by the Israeli Foreign Ministry. Neither seriously demanded the needed letter of apology (still doable for posterity).
22 April 2021
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Secret ballot: 76 for, 34 against,8 abstentions, 2 spoiled ballots
Addressing a group of far-right and neo-Nazi devotees on 23 June 2020, Dr. Bubnys proudly speaks under a banner of two notorious Hitler collaborators, Jonas Noreika (see Silvia Foti’s new book) and Kazys Škirpa. The 23rd of June 1941 is the date remembered by Lithuanian Jewry as the outbreak of the Holocaust with onset of widespread murder, dehumanizing degradation and humiliation of civilian Jewish neighbors by the “white armbanders” and “LAF” forces (whose pamphlets declared explicitly their plans for their nation’s Jewish citizens). But instead of honoring the victims, the state’s far-right historians-in-tow glorify the perpetrators as “anti-Soviet rebels,” a well known historic nonsense: the Soviet army was fleeing Operation Barbarossa, Hitler’s invasion of the USSR, the largest invasion of human history, not the local Jew-killers with their white armbands. More on the historic background.
Tension mounts: How will Lithuania’s government (and its state-sponsored historians and “foreign Jewish leaders in tow“) mark the eightieth anniversary two months from now, on 23 June 2021?
14 April 2021
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1937 – 2021
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15 April 2021
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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
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April 2021
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The Lithuanian Holocaust perpetrator’s Chicago-based granddaughter has told the whole truth about her grandfather, J. Noreika. But meanwhile, in central Vilnius, a flashy new plaque (erected less than two years ago) continues to glorify the collaborator, who helped organize the destruction of thousands of Jewish citizens. As the 80th anniversary of the onset of the Lithuanian Holocaust, 23 June 1941, rapidly approaches this June, the question arises: Will the government (and its sycophants) again be honoring the perpetrators on this day, or, at long last, the victims? Last year, the chief historian of the state-sponsored “Genocide Center” stood proudly before a neo-Nazi banner glorifying two major collaborators (including Mr. Noreika…).
Meanwhile, Kaunas’s Vytautas Magnus University continues to feature a lecture hall named for, and adorned by a bas relief of a second major collaborator, the Nazi puppet prime minister of 1941. Hopefully the city of Kaunas will remove all its shrines to Nazi collaborators before being named a “capital of European culture” in 2022. See Lev Golinkin’s sweeping expose, earlier this year, of the wider issue of glorification of Holocaust perpetrators internationally.
April 2021
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(that often progresses with the de facto underpinning of American Jewish organizations whose leaders are addicted to “Glories and Medals in the East”
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Defending History is no fly-by-night. On our pages…
6 April 2021
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All Welcome at Yom Hashoah Event Featuring DH Editor Dovid Katz
in international discussion of Danny Ben Moshe’s film Rewriting History
Tuesday 6 April 2021 at Midday US Eastern time (5 PM London, 7 PM Israel and Baltics)
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March 2021
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Roland Binet on
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March 2021
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March 2021
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Collection from the Lithuanian lands covers the period from Catherine the Great to the Holocaust. Report in the Jewish Chronicle.
Feb. 2021
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Cinderella finally comes to the ball
“A Powerful Statement”
Welcome to Defending History!
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.
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16 February 2021
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Happy Independence Day, Lithuania!
We all join in celebrating February 16th 1918, just 103 years ago, that ushered in the successful interwar republic. Classic image of the Jews of the shtetl Dorbyán (Darbėnai, northwestern Lithuania) in 1928 celebrating the tenth anniversary of the happy day so cherished by all the peoples in the land. . .
12 February 2021
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Viktorija Kazlienė
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February 2021
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February Flare-Up of Holocaust Polemics in Lithuanian Mass Media:
1: Defending History’s take on the sunshine boy “heroes” — perpetually silent until all are in any case slamming an obscure parliamentarian (or the far-right, antisemitic Genocide Center) for the usual Holocaust falsification.
February 2021
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6 February 2021
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27 January 2021
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31 January 2021
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For decades the spirit of life and leadership at Vilnius’s legendary Green House. See Defending History’s Rachel Kostanian section. Her best-known book is Spiritual Resistance in the Vilna Ghetto (with preface by Sir Martin Gilbert).
January 2021
Israel’s Ambassador Joel Lion in Kiev
But at same time, Israeli Foreign Ministry colludes to silence dialogue on glorification of Holocaust collaborators in Lithuania (including the “naming of 2021”); Wiesenthal Center’s Dr. Zuroff protests in Jerusalem Post
Lithuanian Parliament’s dedication of 2021 to memory of J. Lukša, alleged Kaunas 1941 killer is little mentioned after early protests by WJC’s Dr. Laurence Weinbaum, and Yakov Faitelson, son of legendary escaper from Ninth Fort. Defending History’s take, chronology of the debate, and alternative dedication of 2021. Even the usually hesitant official Jewish community, and its AJC partner, spoke out
Dec. 2020 — Jan. 2021
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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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14 Dec. 2020
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25 Nov. 2020
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Dovid Katz’s lecture on “Writing the Holocaust out of History?” at the Jewish Holocaust Centre in Melbourne, Australia now on Youtube (PP presentation online)
Defending History’s editor is named to Top 100 People Positively Influencing Jewish Life in 2020 at @Algemeiner’s annual banquet (#J100) in New York City. DH’s campaign to save Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery is cited.
Nov. 2020
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Participation of honoree witnessed in both Kaunas Garage Massacre and the beheading of Rabbi Zalmen Osovsky. See chronology of the 2020 debate. Yakov Faitelson joins protests by Defending History, Dr. Laurence Weinbaum (World Jewish Congress), Rabbi Andrew Baker (American Jewish Committee) and Ms. Faina Kukliansky (head of official Jewish Community of Lithuania).
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Nov. 2020
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“Lithuania’s Liveliest Cemetery”
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Eyewitness reports on recent hearings:
Defending History was there…
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Autumn 2020
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Trending in Defending…
Does the president’s PR team really want big posters of Holocaust collaborators at his rallies?
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Summer 2020
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″The Power of the Ancient Hebrew Letters”
Arkady Kurliandchik and Dr. Andrius Kulikauskas lead a group in partnership with the Vilnius Jewish Community, in placing stones with Hebrew letters painted in the traditional gold paint (used to highlight lettering in old Lithuanian Jewish / Litvak gravestones) at the Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery at Piramónt (Šnipiškės / Shnípeshok), site of the abandoned Soviet sports palace and a planned national convention center. Thousands of graves are still there all around the building. The new gold-lettered Jewish stones were variously placed to mark out the approximate perimeter of the cemetery.
Stone lettering and photos: Andrius Kulikauskas
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Recent News:
Vilnius City Council rushes through decision for convention center with annex in heart of Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery. Julius Norwilla reports from Vilnius. Rabbi Elchonon Baron reacts from Jerusalem (video).
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July 2020
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6 July 2020
The Defending History community wishes all our readers in Lithuania
A HAPPY CROWNING OF MINDAUGAS DAY
celebrating the Lithuanian king’s crowning in 1253. A wonderful modern holiday for all the peoples of Lithuania, and the world, and especially those with roots in the Grand Duchy…
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26 June 2020
European Jewish Congress Reports on Ruta Bloshtein’s Petition to Save Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery from Convention Center Project: 51,000 Have Signed to Date
Local, international opposition growing by the day
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25 June 2020
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23 June 2020
Dr. Arūnas Bubnys, chief historian at the state-sponsored Genocide Center in Vilnius and long-time member of the state-sponsored “International Historical Commission” proudly appears under the banner of two heinous Holocaust collaborators, J. Noreika and K. Škirpa, at an event glorifying the day, 23 June 1941, that murder and mayhem broke out against the country’s defenseless Jewish citizens.
Škirpa with Hitler in Berlin
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23 June 2020
Remembering June 23rd 1941: Why Would Anyone in the EU Want to Celebrate the Outbreak of the Baltic Holocaust under Guise of “Rebellion”?
Outbreak of mass murder, injury, pillage and humiliation of defenseless Jewish neighbors by the LAF (Lithuanian Activist Front) and others before arrival of first Nazi forces. Soviet forces were fleeing Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa — not the local Hitler allies. The real heroes of the day are Lithuanians (and Latvians, Estonians, Ukrainians and others) who risked everything to just do the right thing and save a neighbor from these Hitlerist organizations…
Here in Vilnius: Lithuanian parliament (Seimas) schedules 10:30 AM (Vilnius time) press conference. Fears rising that this will be yet another effort to glorify June 23rd and the outbreak of the Lithuanian Holocaust at the hands of the LAF, provisional gov. and assorted other local Hitler allies. Speakers include members of Seimas, Genocide Center and Red-Brown Commission…
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Late Spring 2020
Who’s Gonna Welcome Folks to a Convention Center in the Middle of the Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery?
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Dramatic Developments for Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery, Still Slated to Become Vilnius Convention Center
Two new websites launched: Save Vilna (US and Israel) and Respect the Cemetery (Vilnius); Both efforts entail Christian-Jewish (& Lithuanian-Litvak) alliance. Vilnius project announces 14 June public event. Latest report by Andrius Kulikauskas.
Elected chairman of Vilnius Jewish Community, representing vast majority of Lithuania’s Jews, reaffirms VJC’s firm opposition to desecration of the cemetery.
Defending History has been on the case for “five long years” and helped inspire international opposition to a convention center that would never be sited in an old cemetery of the majority religion population. See the latest.
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June-July 2020
Lithuania’s Defense Ministry magazine glorifies Nazi collaborator and Holocaust cheerleader Kazys Škirpa on its front cover and in a massive article. See reactions from the Lithuanian Jewish Community and G. Gochin’s Times of Israel blog, and Defending History. SEE OUR REPORT.
Incredibly, the Defense Ministry still flaunts the cover on its website (as PDF).
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May 2020
Tale of the “Euronote Vilnius Cemetery”: See DH, JTA, AJ
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May Day in Vilnius: Three major tourism federations united to finance the covering of the old Vilna Jewish cemetery with empty chairs with symbolic 1000-euro notes pasted on (directly above extant graves), symbolizing the economic loss from not rushing ahead with a convention center in the middle of the cemetery. The 500 year old cemetery, where thousands of citizens of Vilnius lie buried is not mentioned.
Real or photoshopped?
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Solidarity with Minorities in Time of Pandemic?
Some use period for further glorification of Holocaust collaborators; Some tout postcrisis economic renewal from “Convention Center in the Cemetery” Project in Vilnius
Former foreign minister calls on present FM to renounce views and support state glorification of brutal Holocaust collaborator J. Noreika (after supreme administrative court confirmed during national lockdown the “hero status” of the same collaborator).
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Meanwhile:
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March 2020
BALTIC FAR RIGHT’S “MARCHING SEASON” AGAIN GLORIFIES HITLER’S COLLABORATORS
VILNIUS + KAUNAS ON 16 FEB: DH eyewitness report on 16 February march in Vilnius. Organizers again targeted DH staff; 16 Feb in central Kaunas.
February-March 2020
16 February 2020
9 February 2020
BOOKS IN THE DISCUSSION
January 2020
They plan to glorify Nazi collaborators Škirpa, Noreika and Brazaitis
Scene from their 2018 march in the heart of Vilnius (featuring on front banner six Nazi collaborators)…
2018 march in central Vilnius. Photo © DefendingHistory.com
January 2020
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.
Don’t the people of Lithuania (and Europe) deserve a sparkling new and morally clean Vilnius convention center rather than a Soviet-era structure surrounded by five centuries of Jewish graves?
Clemens Heni in Times of Israel on recent Yad Vashem furore
Matt Rubenstein in The Battleground EU: “Changing the Historical Record”
David Pugliese in the Ottawa Citizen on East European Glorification of Holocaust Collaborators
Julius Norwilla in Vilnius’s 7MD on Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery
Clemens Heni in Times of Israel on dissident thinkers in Germany
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23 January 2020
23 January 2020
13 January 2020
Defending History Joins Lithuania in Mourning the Fourteen Unarmed Pro-Independence Protesters Murdered by Soviet Forces on 13 Jan. 1991
10 January 2020
from Dr. Andrius Kulikauskas’s post in BNS and Vakarų Ekspresas
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LRT’s “Panorama” runs report on the Soviet sports palace building (timecode: 21:25—25:20), envisaging “hundreds of millions of euros” and “a bag of gold”
2 January 2020
1 January 2020
Antanas Zubrys and Dr. Matilda Zubrienė: Defending History’s Persons of the Year (2020)
Antanas Zubrys and Matilda Zubrienė
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Year of 300th Birthday of the Gaon of Vilna: novel critical approach of Andrius Kulikauskas’s brand new website on calendar of events. Our editor’s papers & articles.
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“7 Kingdoms of the Litvaks” is free online
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19 December 2019
December 2019
Lithuania, a Genuine, Robust Democracy, Continues to Struggle with Free Speech when it Comes to the Holocaust
Nov.-Dec. 2019
Vilnius’s Jewish satirist Motke Chabad shares his own perspective
Is it perhaps an opportune moment for the government to abandon plans for a convention center in the heart of the old Vilna Jewish cemetery, where hundreds of the Gaon’s ancestors and descendants still lie buried? International petition continues to grow.
Autumn 2019
23 Sept. 2019
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Canadian Govt. Officials “Duped” into Participating in Honors for Ukraine’s OUN / UPA Hitler Collaborators
Defending History’s Take: “Canada, a bastion of enlightened liberalism in today’s world, has blundered into a moral mouse-trap. Hopefully its highest leaders will now rapidly correct the error and join all those around the world who condemn the Nazis and their collaborators’ rampages of ethnic-based mass murder and genocide in World War II era Eastern Europe.”
23 September 2019
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Sept. 2019
A Decade of Defending History
Defending History marks its 10th anniversary in Sept. 2019
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9 Sept. 2019
Vilnius is Shamed by Brand New Noreika Plaque Glorifying a Holocaust Collaborator
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
So far, a wall of public silence from the “Yiddish-loving culture minister“, from Yivo, and from the Western and Israeli embassies in Lithuania
Defending History’s take: “A very sad day for Lithuania and its proud ages-old tradition of Grand Duchy tolerance and its current record as a successful democracy. Ten years after Defending History published images of the plaque honoring Noreika, seven years after Evaldas Balciunas brought the issue to the English speaking world, and one month after Vilnius’s bold mayor boldly had the plaque removed, a mob of antisemites who celebrate the Holocaust’s perpetrators have put up an even shinier plaque, rapidly declared to be illegal by the mayor. The text of the new plaque is rather worse from the viewpoint of historic honesty, by referring to Noreika’s imprisonment by the Nazis at one point (the phenomenon of “Holocaust envy”), as if that makes a hero of a brutal Holocaust collaborator. Lithuania’s great people deserve better! Hopefully, the nation’s highest powers will remove the plaque without further delay, in the name of the rule of law, the nation’s standing, and basic human decency. See DH’s sections on: J. Noreika; Collaborators Glorified; the 2019 midsummer events that presaged the latest events.
August 2019
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Prof. Pinchos Fridberg ©DefendingHistory.com
See Pinchos Fridberg section; DH’s 2012 take on Landsbergis. Meanwhile, controversial official head of gov. sponsored Jewish community, eminent attorney Ms. Faina Kukliansky, wins acclaim for (finally) standing up to Landsbergis, after he used crude anti-Jewish ethnic slur on FB; Baltic Times features a rude reply with no pretense of evenhanded journalism. EU Health Commissioner Vytenis Andriukaitis speaks out (see DH’s Andriukaitis section, and his classic statements on the Seventy Years Declaration and the reburial of wartime Nazi puppet prime minister in 2012).
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9 Aug. 2019
Ten years after Defending History published images of the plaques. Seven years after DH’s Evaldias Balčiūnas brought the case of J. Noreika to the English speaking world. Four years after Dr. Andrius Kulikauskas‘s classic DH essay on K. Škirpa:
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…
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Poster advertising Aug. 7th rally blasts mayor who took action against glorification of collaborators, shows Jewish and gay pride symbols as the culprits
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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Are they aware of the systematic exclusion from their conference of all the local Jewish scholars in this field who have expressed disagreement with the glorification of Holocaust collaborators (including Holocaust survivors who have written about Jewish Vilna)? Will they consider signing Ruta Bloshtein’s petition on the old Vilna Jewish cemetery?
1 August 2019
“It Pays to Defend History”
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Vilnius mayor Remigijus Šimašius
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Lithuanian author & ethicist Evaldas Balčiūnas
Over the years, Defending History’s campaign won support from the Simon Wiesenthal Center; the Rambam Mesivta High School that staged a peaceful demonstration at Lithuania’s consulate in New York; Noreika’s granddaughter, American author Silvia Foti; and Californian Litvak scion Grant Gochin, who took Vilnius’s “Genocide Center” to court. The GC’s public statement revealed its true view on the Holocaust. Dr. Andrius Kulikauskas is curator of online Captain Noreika Museum.
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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.
24 July 2019
Vote is 20 to 16
Škirpa is in the middle (Berlin, 1941)
Changing toxic street names that glorify Hitler collaborators is high on the list of the very easy things Lithuania needs to do to achieve justice on the irksome history issues that will just not go away. See DH’s seven solutions compiled with the help of the late Dr. Shimon Alperovich.
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July 2019
Radio Free Europe (Radio Liberty) report fails to inform readers of the Double Genocide issues and abuse of history to further far-right Holocaust revisionism that includes glorification of Holocaust collaborators
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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
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June-July 2019
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June 2019
The Question: Will an EU/NATO democracy continue to sink government funds into glorification of Holocaust collaborators? Don’t the Lithuanian people have higher values and causes into which to invest their hard-earned taxpayer money?
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23 June 2019
Meanwhile, a naive article in National Review accepts the distorted history of Vilnius’s “Genocide Museum” (see our critique of the museum), that calls the Hitlerist “Lithuanian Activist Front” (LAF)’s outbreak of violence against Jewish neighbors a rebellion against the Soviets. The brutal Soviet occupation forces were fleeing Hitler’s invasion (the largest in human history), not the LAF Jew-killers.
These killers didn’t fire a single shot against the Soviets when they were in power. You can’t “rebel” against someone who is in panic running away from someone else. . . The Holocaust is being rewritten by the East European far right (in part to make heroes out of the Eastern European collaborators) even as leaders of major Jewish organization in the US and elsewhere remain silent.
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16 June 2019
The Good Old Pattern Continues in Biržai (Birzh), Northern Lithuania:
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June 2019
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May-June 2019
First monument on American soil glorifying a wartime Nazi collaborator who is also a prime icon for his country’s neo-Nazis today was inaugurated last month (May 4) in the presence of the visiting Lithuanian foreign minister
On Ramanauskas’s Holocaust-era role see courageous, pioneering articles of Lithuanian ethicist Evaldas Balčiūnas in 2014, 2017 and his latest that has just appeared. For years after starting his series of articles “Why does the state commemorate murderers?” Balčiūnas was hounded by prosecutors and police (scroll to May 2014).
Latest far-right death threats against DH editor appear on Facebook (as PDF; transl.). They were apparently instigated by the neo-Nazis’ top blogger in Lithuania, “Zeppelinus” (PDF; part transl.) who is said to work in the Ministry of the Economy. These threats came in response to DH’s opinion that Lithuania’s interests are not best served by a monument in Chicago to an alleged Holocaust collaborator who is also a prime icon for today’s neo-Nazi parades here. Samples of Zeppelinus’s racist, misogynistic, homophobic, antisemitic output of hate. Some of his earlier “artwork” on DH editor.
This monument, honoring Adolfas Ramanauskas (Vanagas), who boasted in his memoirs of leading an LAF unit of fascist Hiterlist militia during the first weeks of the Holocaust (June-July 1941) in southeastern Lithuania, was overwhelmingly rejected for placement on public land by New Britian, Connecticut one year ago. But on Saturday, 4 May it was inaugurated by Lithuania’s foreign minister on the private property of the Lithuanian World Center in Chicago, Illinois. The English news release casually omits the reference to the Holocaust issues cited in the original BNS Lithuanian report.
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.”
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3 May 2019
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28 April 2019
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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Meanwhile in London, a Serious Incident Report has been filed with the UK’s national Charity Commission requesting an investigation of the role of the CPJCE in the destruction of the Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery.
Unique study in body language: “blockbuster video” of London CPJCE staff allegedly morally selling other people’s graves against the rulings of all the rabbis of Vilnius and of the planet. In fact, when the then chief rabbi of Lithuania, Rabbi Chaim Burshtein, spoke up in 2015, he was fired for expressing his views. Views of Rabbi S.J. Feffer (leading Litvak religious authority in the country) and Rabbi S.B. Krinsky (official rabbi of the synagogue / Chabad Lithuania).
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24 April 2019
Granddaughter of Holocaust perpetrator J. Noreika, the American author and educator Silvia Foti launches a bold international petition calling on Lithuania’s gov. to stop glorifying him.
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23 April 2019
“The rights of minority cemeteries are human rights”
Legal Action Underway on Attempts to Pilfer Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery for National Convention Center
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8 April 2019
Vilnius Plaque Glorifying Holocaust Collaborator J. Noreika is Smashed by Maverick Candidate for the European Parliament, Attorney Stanislavas Tomas
All on film, streamed live Monday morning 8 April 2019, from candidate’s bilingual statements through to his calling the police and their eventual arrival to make the arrest
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Defending History’s comment:
“We unequivocally condemn violent acts against any property. Plaques can and will be replaced, and acts of property violence are totally illegal, inherently unethical, and utterly counterproductive to the noble cause of ridding Europe of glorification of Nazism. There needs to be dignified, peaceful and lawful civic and international pressure for the removal of all state-sponsored, public-space glorification of Holocaust collaborators, not least in Lithuania where some 96% of the Jewish population was massacred with massive local collaboration and participation. The real heroes are the amazing Lithuanians who risked everything in 1941 to just save a neighbor and we pray for the day when plaques and streets for them will abound across the land. See our own Person of the Year for 2018 and 2019.”
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Samples of other monuments and street names glorifying Holocaust collaborators. DH section on glorification of collaborators. The major Noreika monument in Vilnius is actually the engraved marble stone on the city’s central Gedimino Boulevard outside the Genocide Museum:
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8 April 2019
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3 April 2019
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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26 March 2019
Public welcome at the reading of the verdict at 1 PM at Vilnius Regional Administrative Court, Žygimantų 2 in the city center
Will a court in an EU/NATO country uphold a far-right Holocaust-obfuscating institution’s decision to make a national hero of a documented Holocaust collaborator?
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25 March 2019
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20 March 2019
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AROUND 1000 TAKE PART IN 16 MARCH CENTRAL RIGA PARADE GLORIFYING LATVIA’S WARTIME NAZI WAFFEN SS
Detail from the day
Latvian participant in last month’s torchlight march in Vilnius on 16 Feb.
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13 March 2019
Are they really in cahoots with the allegedly corrupt bodies (CPJCE in London, “Admas Kodesh” or “AK” in NY) who gave “permission” for a convention center in the heart of the old Vilna Jewish Cemetery against the views of all other rabbis and ethicists? The NY branch (AK) has published crude personal invective against scholars who hold other opinions, including Prof. Bernard Fryshman (who has now taken USCPAHA to the courts).
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BACKGROUND:
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8 March 2019
After ‘Hearing Both Sides’ at Trial of March 5th, Vilnius Court Sets Verdict for 27th
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Defending History was there. Our take:
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.
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“It had the air of a 21st century Lithuanian version of America’s Scopes Monkey Trial.”
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Background: Run-up to eve of the trial
California Financial Planner Takes Lithuania’s State-Sponsored “Genocide Center” to Court on March 5th for Enabling Gov. Glorification of Holocaust Collaborator J. Noreika
Proceedings are open to the public (Tuesday March 5th, 10 AM at Vilnius Regional Administrative Court at Žygimantų 2 in central Vilnius). Media to date includes the BBC World Service, Chicago Tribune, JTA. The plaintiff is California wealth advisor Grant Arthur Gochin whose family lost around 100 relatives in the Holocaust in the area where Noreika operated. He will be represented in Vilnius by attorney Rokas Rudzinskas and specialist Dr. Andrius Kulikauskas, author of the Query that launched the case. He has a compelling letter of support from Noreika’s granddaughter, American educator and author Silvia Foti. See Ms. Foti’s remarkable 2018 essay in Salon, and the recent takes by Grant Gochin, Dovid Katz, Andrius Kulikauskas, and Efraim Zuroff.
The case of J. Noreika was brought to the English speaking world in 2012 by journalist and ethicist Evaldas Balčiūnas of Šiauliai (Shavl), Lithuania, as part of a series of articles asking why his government honors alleged Holocaust collaborators. He was “rewarded” with years of prosecutorial and police harassment and kangaroo trials. Please scroll down to May 2014 in DH’s Balčiūnas section. In some opinions, Lithuania is a totally free-speech country with the marked exception of Holocaust history.
WILL THE AMERICAN, BRITISH, CANADIAN, FRENCH, GERMAN, IRISH, ISRAELI, NORWEGIAN & SWEDISH EMBASSIES (AMONG OTHERS) AND HUMAN RIGHTS ORGANIZATIONS BE SENDING OBSERVERS TO THE TRIAL ON TUESDAY?
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March 2019
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20 February 2019
VILNIUS ALERT WED. 20 FEB. 2019
Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky, Legendary Jewish Partisan who Fought the Nazis in the Forests of Lithuania, Currently Major Yiddish Culture Educator, Will be Guest of Honor at Today’s Yiddish Reading Circle
Fania Brantsovsky (left) with the late Dr. Rokhl Margolis (1921-2015) in Vilnius in 2007
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SPECIAL SESSION IN HONOR OF THE NEW BILINGUAL YIDDISH-LITHUANIAN EDITION OF THE LATE AARON GARON’S ESSAYS ON JEWISH VILNA EDITED BY LINAS VILDŽIŪNAS, WHO WILL BE ATTENDING THE EVENT, ALONG WITH THE AUTHOR’S CHILDREN, TAMARA AND EVGENY GARON.
6 to 7:30 PM AT THE VILNIUS JEWISH COMMUNITY, MESINIU 3 IN VILNIUS OLD TOWN. ALL ARE WELCOME!
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16 February 2019
“IT PAYS TO DEFEND HISTORY”
“Once again, it becomes clear how Defending History is the true friend of Lithuania and other democratic states in the Eastern EU that need glorification of Holocaust collaborators like a hole in the head”
DH’s Vilnius monitors, observing the event for a decade, report on “significant progress”: For the first time in many years, the far-right February 16 march, though at times noxious (e.g. when a group reveled in a “Noreika plaque photo-op”), had no visible banners glorifying local Holocaust collaborators and no visible swastikas on flags, and no organized chants of “Lietuva Lietuviams” (Lithuania for Lithuanians). By contrast, a few Latvian visitors wore jackets emblazoned with “Waffen SS”. At its conclusion, two of the march’s organizers approached our team for a civil discussion which turned to the participation of “non-Catholic & non-ethnic Lithuanians” in the war of independence leading to the rise of the democratic interwar Lithuanian Republic on 16 Feb. 1918.
Vilnius Authorities Again Gifting Capital’s Storied Old Town for Far-Right March on Cherished Independence Day
Are they celebrating the Holocaust and the massacre of Lithuanian Jewry?
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.
Come and join Defending History’s monitoring team. Event scheduled to start Saturday 16 February 6 PM at Aušros Vartų. Facebook details; website.
See Defending History’s decade-long eyewitness coverage of far-right marches in Vilnius, Kaunas, and Riga.
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A Short History Lesson:
All of interwar Lithuania’s 239 Jewish communities (massacred in 1941) cherished and celebrated February 16th with heart and soul. They were proud Lithuanian citizens. It was also their Independence Day. See the 2013 letter from the late Joe Melamed, longtime elected leader of the Association of Lithuanian Jews in Israel, and any of countless records and pictures. Here, a photo (with bilingual Hebrew and Lithuanian handwritten captions) of the Jews of Dorbyán (Darbėnai) celebrating February 16th 1928, the tenth anniversary of independence:
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30 January 2019
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27 January 2019
Holocaust Remembrance Week 2019
In recent times, the greatest threat to Holocaust Remembrance Day is the Double Genocide Holocaust revisionist movement whose “constitution” is the 2008 Prague Declaration. Defending History is proud to have taken part in the Europarliamentary response, the 2012 Seventy Years Declaration. The relevance of all this to Holocaust Remembrance Day was made crystal clear nine years ago by Yehuda Bauer on the pages of the Jerusalem Post. See also the essay by Holocaust survivor and scholar, and former director of Yad Vashem, Dr. Yitzhak Arad, in Defending History. Identity Films has just made available free online its 2012 documentary Rewriting History. Richard Bloom Productions has done the same for its 2013 film, Defending Holocaust History.
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26 January 2019
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24 January 2019
“The rights of minority cemeteries to be left in peace are human rights”
Two Visualizations of a Convention Center in the Middle of Vilna’s Old Jewish Cemetery
I: Lithuania’s State Bank (“Turto Bankas”) triumphantly issues its latest visualization for a national convention center in the heart of the old Vilna Jewish cemetery, surrounded by thousands of Jewish graves. The huge new annex is “artfully” obscured (at the back).
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2: Defending History issues its reply visualization. The people of Vilnius deserve a sparkling new convention center that will be a pride to all peoples everywhere, where they will be greeted by leaders of the arts, culture, music, politics, not by the tens of thousands of ghosts of the Jews of Vilna whose families purchased their burial plots in perpetuity. Join the 45,000 people who have signed Ruta Bloshtein’s international petition.
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Genuine heroes of this saga—both written out of the film
