Tag Archives: Sergejus Kanovicius

Welcoming New Director of Lithuania’s State Jewish Museum

Posted on 21 April 2026 by Defending History

OPINION | MUSEUMS | VILNIUS | LITVAK AFFAIRS

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OPINION

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VILNIUS—For several decades, the Defending History community has been providing commentary on Jewish and history related museums in Lithuania and the wider region, primarily in our Museums section, initiated nearly eighteen years ago. Here in Vilnius, we have endeavored to give voice to sectors of modern Jewish (and sometimes non-Jewish) life whose views have had no other channel, especially since the closure, over a decade and a half ago, of the Jewish community’s long-beloved quadrilingual Jewish newspaper, Jerusalem of Lithuania, that was home to open and vigorous debate for decades, under the inspired editorship of the late Milan Chersonski. Ultimately, it was replaced by a PR type website dedicated to one view only, that of the tiny clique in control of the tens of millions of euros in restitution funding that has excluded the interests of today’s Jewish community, and its healthy diversity of views.

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Posted in Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Museums, News & Views, Opinion, Vilnius | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Welcoming New Director of Lithuania’s State Jewish Museum

Museum of The Lost Truth: A Lithuanian Drama

Posted on 5 October 2018 by Defending History

OPINION  |  MUSEUMS  |  SHEDUVA  |  POLITICS OF MEMORY  |  SHTETL COMMEMORATIONS  |  HUMOR (OF SORTS)

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by Evaldas Balčiūnas

Evaldas Balčiūnas informed the English speaking world of a series of state honors for alleged Holocaust collaborators, starting with Jonas Noreika back in 2012. He paid a hefty personal price for it (scroll down his DH section to 2014). 

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PREAMBLE

The Lost Shtetl is a massive, holistic project to reclaim the Lithuanian Jewish heritage of Šeduva (Shádeve, older Shádev). Plans include a multimillion euro state-of-the-art museum complex scheduled to open in 2020 that is slated to become an international tourist attraction. Now is an excellent time for public comment and observers’ contemplation.

“The Lost Shtetl” will not be a generic community of faceless Litvaks. It will make tangible the lives of real individuals. But will we learn about the real individuals from the town and its region who destroyed them? Their names and faces? Or will we simply tuck them away into the phrase: “The Nazis and their local collaborators murdered 664 Šeduva Jews in Liaudiškiai forest”?

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Posted in Commemorations for Destroyed Communities, Evaldas Balčiūnas, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Museums, News & Views, Politics of Memory, Šeduva (Sheduva, Shádeve, Shádov) and its "Museum of the Lost Shtetl", South Africa | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Museum of The Lost Truth: A Lithuanian Drama

Gurevich Explains How Kukliansky, Levin, Žakas, and Kanovich Control 40% of Votes in “Kangaroo Election”

Posted on 22 May 2017 by Defending History

OPINION  |  VILNIUS JEWISH LIFE  |  LITVAK AFFAIRS  |  DEMOCRACY  |  GOOD WILL FOUNDATION  |  HUMAN RIGHTS

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VILNIUS—Simon Gurevich (Simonas Gurevičius), candidate for the leadership of the Lithuanian Jewish Community, today issued a statement on his public Facebook page inviting members of the community to participate in the electoral conference for chairperson of the Vilnius Jewish Community, to be held this Wednesday evening 24 May 2014 6 PM (18:00) at the Karolina Hotel in Vilnius. His statement, in Lithuanian, reminds readers that the recent attempts to cancel the conference (whose date was democratically voted on by a clear majority of Vilnius Jewish Community Board members) would result in the application of the “new rules” decided on in the middle of the current campaign that would effectively disenfranchise 2,200 Vilnius Jews by recounting their votes from the present 22 or so (via the longstanding formula of 100 people = one vote) to one vote, while each of the elite power brokers in the chairperson’s circle (not all of whom live in Lithuania) would in effect have the votes to decide the entire future of the Jewish community, resulting in a tragic undermining of the future of the actual living Jewish people in Lithuania. To make matters worse, various of these “machers” have two or three votes each.

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Posted in "Good Will Foundation" (Jewish Restitution in Lithuania), A Stolen Election and a Small Jewish Community's Protest, Free Speech & Democracy, Lithuania, Lithuania: Textbook Case of East European Restitution (for Lost Jewish Assets) Abused to Dismantle a Vibrant Jewish Community, Lithuania's Jewish Community Issues, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Šeduva (Sheduva, Shádeve, Shádov) and its "Museum of the Lost Shtetl", Simon Gurevich (Simonas Gurevičius) | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Gurevich Explains How Kukliansky, Levin, Žakas, and Kanovich Control 40% of Votes in “Kangaroo Election”

A Major New Shtetl Museum for Shádev (Shádov, Shádeve, Today’s — Šeduva)

Posted on 15 February 2017 by Defending History

OPINION  |  LITVAK AFFAIRS  |  MUSEUMS

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by Dovid Katz (Vilnius)

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VILNIUS—The Litvak world, internationally fragmented and weak, yet so vibrant and creative, has been cheered by news reports of the new shtetl museum to rise in the near future in Shádev, a Lithuanian town of many centuries of Jewish heritage where a great rabbinic personality, Reb Móyshe Ha-Góyle (“Moses the Exile”, Méyshe Ha-Géyle in deep Litvish pronunciation, Moshé Ha-Golé in Israeli Hebrew) thrived in the fifteenth century.

A good shtetl museum here will be a blessing to the Litvak, European Jewish, Yiddish and shtetl heritage internationally. It will be a blessing to modern, democratic Lithuania. To this day, the basket of idols of the contemporary Jewish market downplays the magnitude of Yiddish language, literature, and culture, shtetl culture and heritage, and the magnificent East European Jewish legacy more generally. News media have gone with reports by AFP and by JTA, and there is more on the project’s website.

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Posted in Arts, Commemorations for Destroyed Communities, Dovid Katz, Lithuania, Lithuania's Jewish Community Issues, Litvak Affairs, Museums, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, Šeduva (Sheduva, Shádeve, Shádov) and its "Museum of the Lost Shtetl" | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on A Major New Shtetl Museum for Shádev (Shádov, Shádeve, Today’s — Šeduva)

March of the Living at Vilnius Mass-Murder Site: Sergey Kanovich Speaks Out

Posted on 2 May 2011 by Defending History

Sergey Kanovich

Vilnius-born author Sergey Kanovich (Sergejus Kanovičius) published in today’s issue of Bernardinai a short and powerful statement for the ceremony later today at Ponár (Paneriai), the mass-murder site outside Vilnius where 100,000 civilians, among them 70,000 Jews, were murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust. Most of the actual shooting was carried out by local Lithuanian units sometimes nowadays glorified as ‘anti-Soviet heroes’ by certain establishment circles, even as a parallel series of Holocaust commemoration activities are produced during this year’s parallel years of commemoration proclaimed in late 2010 by the Lithuanian parliament (see here and here) for 2011, which marks the seventieth anniversary of the events.

“They took your life away. And there are those who continue to try to assassinate your memory — again, today, almost without resistance and with impunity, now and again, the spirit of swastikas and the white armbands of the LAF casts a shadow over Jerusalem of Lithuania. And today there are those who still desire to see your executioners as heroes.”

— SERGEY KANOVICH

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Posted in Commemorations for Destroyed Communities, Double Genocide: The New Form of Holocaust Revisionism & Denial, News & Views, Politics of Memory, Sergey Kanovich | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on March of the Living at Vilnius Mass-Murder Site: Sergey Kanovich Speaks Out

Justice Minister Defies Documented History, Denies Lithuanian Holocaust Collaboration

Posted on 2 December 2009 by Defending History

On his blog, the justice minister of Lithuania, Remigijus Simasius, dismisses the internationally known history of massive (and official and institutional) Lithuanian collaboration with the Nazi annihilation of the country’s Jewish population during the Holocaust. English translation. Delfi summary in Lithuanian.  BNS summary in English. He makes no mention of his own prosecutors’ continuing defamation of Holocaust survivors who joined the anti-Nazi resistance, or the international condemnation of his prosecutors’ activities. He does, however, fault the US, Great Britain and the USSR in connection with the Holocaust.

His blog cites his prime minister’s earlier HARDtalk interview with the BBC’s Jonathan Charles on 30 Nov (video here; → Holocaust issues at timecode starting ±18:40; alternate here at ±5:55). The PM effectively let slip the policy of investing in Jewish memorials and projects while trying to (a) equate the Holocaust with Soviet crimes, and (b) downplay local collaboration.

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Posted in News & Views, Politics of Memory, Vilnius Mayor Remigijus Šimašius, World Jewish Congress (WJC) and ORT | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment