Tag Archives: Vilnius Yiddish Institute

Those Thousands of Yiddish Books in Vilnius?



OPINION  |  YIDDISH AFFAIRS  |  VILNIUS YIDDISH INSTITUTE

VILNIUS—Reports are mounting of inquiries about thousands of Yiddish books donated between 2000 and 2018 to “Vilnius University’s Yiddish institute” being met with Orwellian responses along the lines of “they have been deposited until further donors come forward.” After the Vilnius Yiddish Institute was closed down in 2018, and the one actual Yiddish activity of its final eight years, the intensive Vilnius Yiddish summer program, abruptly discontinued, its executive director, Dr. Sarunas Liekis, a longtime member of the state’s “red-brown commission” on Nazi and Soviet crimes, made the books unavailable to students, local and visiting scholars and the wider community. According to sources, a claim is being made that they are the personal property of the heirs of the late Richard Maullin, the donor who “bought” the (some say fictitious) shares of the institute for $25,000 from Tel Aviv resident Mendy Cahan in 2005, and then, in 2010, purged the institute of Yiddish professors not willing to go along with state Holocaust revisionist PR (Maullin was honored by a Lithuanian government medal in 2015). As a result, the “Yiddish” institute was left with no Yiddish teachers for eleven months a year from 2010 onward, but continued with the widely acclaimed summer course that was established in Oxford in 1982 and moved to Vilnius in 1998.

A documented history of these events is provided by Defending History.

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Posted in Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Vilnius Yiddish Institute, Yiddish Affairs | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Those Thousands of Yiddish Books in Vilnius?

Curious History of a Yiddish Professorship at Vilnius University & its “Vilnius Yiddish Institute”


LAST UPDATE



YIDDISH AND JUDAIC STUDIES MANIPULATED FOR HOLOCAUST REVISIONISM  | VILNIUS YIDDISH INSTITUTE  |  BORNS JEWISH STUDIES PROGRAM AT INDIANA UNIVERSITY  |  RICHARD MAULLIN

Its Prehistory (1990-1999), History (1999-2010) and Posthistory (2010-2018) from the Year of Lithuania’s Declaration of Independence Onward

CAN GOVERNMENT AGENCIES STILL WRITE INDIVIDUALS OUT OF HISTORY IN POST-SOVIET SPACE? DO VILNIUS UNIVERSITY’S DEANS AND RECTOR APPROVE OF THE PRACTICE? CAN A PAST PROFESSOR WITH A PERFECT RECORD OVER 11 YEARS (NO COMPLAINTS, NO INCIDENTS) BE WRITTEN OUT OF THE UNIVERSITY’S HISTORY AND DEFAMED IN THE UNIVERSITY’S NAME ON ORDERS OF SOMEONE AT THE “INTERNATIONAL COMMISSION FOR THE EVALUATION OF THE CRIMES OF THE NAZI AND SOVIET REGIMES IN LITHUANIA” (THE “RED-BROWN COMMISSION“)?

A “for the record” page in progress, developed in response to repeated public statements by the current director of the Vilnius Yiddish Institute, a member of the state-sponsored Commission on Nazi and Soviet crimes, claiming that Defending History’s editor (a) was never a professor at the university, (b) if he was an elementary Yiddish alphabet teacher paid by some surfers in California, he got fired for not turning up to work. Further documents are being processed for inclusion in the bizarre but curiously telling chapter of the history of Yiddish Studies in the 21st century. The political manipulation (ranging from West European far-left to East European far-right) of Yiddish-less “Yiddish” is a theme in the final chapter of Yiddish and Power (Palgrave Macmillan 2015) by the Yiddishist in question, Dovid Katz.

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Posted in "Jewish" Events as Cover?, Bloomington-Borns Program Manipulated?, Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky (Fania Brancovskaja), Free Speech & Democracy, Holocaust Policies of Mr. Ronaldas Račinskas and the State-Sponsored "International Commission" (ICECNSORL), Identity Theft of Litvak Heritage, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Richard Maullin, Views of Prof. Sarunas Liekis, Vilnius Yiddish Institute, Yiddish Affairs | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Curious History of a Yiddish Professorship at Vilnius University & its “Vilnius Yiddish Institute”

Vilnius Academic Accuses State History Commission of Having Too Many Foreign Jews as Members



VILNIUSA prominent Vilnius academic known for Holocaust “fixing”, “proud” antisemitism, and a desire to make a national holiday of the day the anti-Jewish violence broke out in Lithuania in 1941, Dr. A. Liekis, returned this week to the fray with a mainstream media attack on the presence of “foreign Jewish” scholars in the state’s history commission, known formally as “The International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupational Regimes in Lithuania, and less formally, and for brevity, as the “Red-Brown Commission.”

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Posted in "Red-Brown Commission", Antisemitism & Bias, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Media Watch, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, Views of Prof. Sarunas Liekis, Vilnius Yiddish Institute | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Vilnius Academic Accuses State History Commission of Having Too Many Foreign Jews as Members

Is Prof. Krutikov the Latest Lithuanian Gov. “Yiddish Star” to be Manipulated?



OPINION  |  JEWISH STUDIES AS COVER  |  YIDDISH AFFAIRS

VILNIUS—Beware of any academic conference hosted by a nation’s parliament. This isn’t about Lithuania, the Baltics, or Eastern Europe. It’s about the intellectual independence and academic integrity of bona fide academic conclaves anywhere. There are elementary questions. Was there a public call for papers? Was there an academic committee established to select those papers by the most competent specialists on the actual topic of the conference? An academic committee that would guard against the petty jealousies, politics of revenge and personal exclusions, as well as larger political correctnesses or state-sponsored-agency attempts to predetermine the proceedings or (ab)use them for governmental PR? Is the conference a free tribune for the exchange of ideas in an atmosphere of collegiality and mutual respect? One where scholars of opposing views can thrash it out, robustly and publicly — without the loss of interpersonal respect — to yield positive results for the area of human enquiry to which the conference was dedicated in the first place. One of the ironies is that Vilnius is nowadays host to some of the world’s best (and most academically free) conferences in an array of fields, both in the humanities and the sciences. That Soviet-style rigging should survive in the case of Judaic studies, of all things, will itself be studied one day.

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Posted in "Good Will Foundation" (Jewish Restitution in Lithuania), "Jewish" Events as Cover?, "Red-Brown Commission", Bloomington-Borns Program Manipulated?, News & Views, Opinion, Vilnius Yiddish Institute, Yiddish Affairs, Yiddish at Oxford, Yivo Manipulated? | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Is Prof. Krutikov the Latest Lithuanian Gov. “Yiddish Star” to be Manipulated?

Baltic Red-Brown “Nazi-Soviet Hunter” Featured at Brazil’s Olympics in Rio



OPINION  |  RED-BROWN COMMISSION (PAGE)  |  RB COMMISSION (SECTION)  |  DOUBLE GENOCIDE  |  VILNIUS YIDDISH INSTITUTE

VILNIUS—The news portal Delfi.lt reported yesterday on Lithuanian sharpshooting star Ronaldas Račinskas making a hit at the Rio de Janeiro Olympics not only for his talents with a rifle, but on his work back home for which the headline calls him the “Nazi-Soviet hunter,” in the latest of a long series of Holocaust terms appropriated and ably recast by the Red-Brown movement’s PR wizzards. Besides heading a commission that now includes the gentleman who launched the campaign, a decade ago, to “hunt” Holocaust survivors who joined the Jewish partisans, his “Nazi and Soviet hunting” refers to his role as Director of the Secretariat of that comission, popularly known as the Red-Brown Commission, a state-financed entity that is one of the main European engines for spreading the revisionist far right’s “Double Genocide” model of World War II history. In that history, as an example, those who liberated Auschwitz are declared to be equal in principle to those who committed the genocide there. Moreover the movement’s primary document, the 2008 Prague Declaration (PD), insists that all European “minds” accept the revised history and regard Nazi and Soviet crimes as equal, a stance widely considered to be a camouflage for obfuscating and diminishing the Holocaust. The response in the European arena came in the form of the 2012 Seventy Years Declaration (SYD).

Director of the Secretariat of the state-sponsored International Commission on the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupational Regimes in Lithuania (known for short as the “Red-Brown Commission”) is a sharpshooting star at the Rio Olympics. He has rapidly brought red-brown politics into the apolitical environment of the Olympic Games. His views on the Holocaust feature in a new German documentary.

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Posted in "Red-Brown Commission", A 21st Century Campaign Against Lithuanian Holocaust Survivors?, Double Genocide, Events, Holocaust Policies of Mr. Ronaldas Račinskas and the State-Sponsored "International Commission" (ICECNSORL), Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Politics of Memory, Vilnius Yiddish Institute, Yiddish Affairs | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Baltic Red-Brown “Nazi-Soviet Hunter” Featured at Brazil’s Olympics in Rio

Judaic (& Yiddish) Institutions in Vilnius, Lithuania (2024)



SEE ALSO: Genealogists & historical tour guides; Litvak resources; Lithuanian Yiddish Video Archive; Dovid Katz’s online resources, including mini-museums of Old Jewish Vilna & interwar LithuaniaSeven Kingdoms of the Litvaks; Windows to a Lost Jewish World

IN ALPHABETIC ORDER:

Center for Studies of the Culture and History of East European Jews

Universiteto 7, Vilnius 01122

Website;  Website 2


International Yiddish Center of the World Jewish Congress

Vienuolio 4-7, Vilnius 01104, Lithuania

with additional city center premises at Gedimino 24

Tel: +3705 208-0306;  Email: info@yiddishcenter.org;   Facebook;   Website

[EDITORIAL COMMENT: It is hoped the World Jewish Congress will disassociate this potentially historic initiative from the government-PR and in-principle Jewless “Vilnius Jewish Library” on Gedimino Boulevard. The Library, for years “legitimized” with pseudo-Jewish street-cred by a shiny plaque featuring “Yiddish” and “World Jewish Congress” has been dedicated largely  to manipulation of naive foreign visitors in the spirit of far-right nationalist Holocaust revisionism. Never once has the Library  invited for a seminar or talk any of the city’s Jewish scholars (or Yiddish specialists) who happen to disagree with state history revisionism featuring Double Genocide and covering for the glorification of local Holocaust collaborators; by contrast, operatives from the Genocide Center and Red-Brown Commission are featured as enlighteners of Jewish truth. Will the Commission ever apologize for its public support for criminal investigations of Holocaust survivors? Some local Jewish people feel the “International Yiddish Center” (afraid of the Library’s and other state “Jew-issue fixers”?) has perhaps in recent years been more dedicated to a “safe, easy and minimum common denominator” of Israeli and Russian-sphere funtime-in-Vilnius without establishing even a minimal infrastructure for the survival of the study of Yiddish language, literature and culture in Lithuania.

Nevertheless, the Yiddish Center has truly supported some genuinely worthy projects of which it can be proud. Hopefully, it will now strive to build on that and  rapidly evolve into a major bona fide provider of Yiddish education, resources and culture, within Lithuania, and indeed — internationally. Remembering that Yiddish is a language with a tragic history, fragile status and rich culture and literature. It is not a PR toy for far-right ultranationalist Baltic Holocaust revisionism which has long employed “Jewish manipulables” in the battle to fix a history that cannot be “fixed”. Surely, the World Jewish Congress has nothing to fear, least of all in the city that was once a world center of serious Yiddish culture, education and scholarship.  At the moment, the founder of such post-Soviet projects in Eastern Europe, the late Prof. Gershon Winer, might well be spinning in his grave…]


Jewish Cultural and Information Center

Mesiniu 3, Vilnius Old Town

Tel: + 3705 260-8718;   FacebookWebsite


Jewish Studies Center at the European Humanities University (EHU)

Savičiaus St. 17, Vilnius 01127

Website


Judaica Research Center at the National Library of Lithuania (in partnership with the Yivo Institute for Jewish Research, NY)

c/o Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania, Gedimino 51, Vilnius 01504

Tel: +3705 239-8699;   Facebook;  Website


Litvak World (/ Jerusalem of the North)

Jogailos 9 ,Vilnius 01116

FacebookWebsite;  Contacts


Vilna Gaon Museum of Jewish History

Naugarduko 10; Pamenkalnio 12; Pylimo 6; etc.

Note: In addition to its Naugarduko 10 main premises and exhibit, there are six additional sites to visit. See web page.

Facebook; Website


Vilnius Jewish Public Library

Gedimino 24 (courtyard), Vilnius

Facebook;  Website


Vilnius University’s History Faculty Chair in Judaic Studies

Faculty of History, Vilnius University, Universiteto 3, Vilnius 01513, Lithuania

Academia.edu; University’s faculty profile


Vilnius (and Brussels) Based Staff of the Museum of the Lost Shtetl

Staff specialists and contacts

Dominikonų  5, Vilnius 01131, Lithuania

Tel: +370 698 44091; Email: info@lostshtetl.com; Website


Vilnius Yiddish Institute

Daukantas Courtyard, Vilnius University, Universiteto 3, Vilnius 01513, Lithuania

[EDITORIAL COMMENT:  The Vilnius Yiddish Institute (VYI) was abruptly closed down by its director in 2019, nine years after he and government officials arranged for the dismissal of Yiddish-teaching staff (for having protested in articles in the West, in English language media, the state prosecutor’s targeting of Holocaust survivors). Term-time courses were abandoned, and projects developed instead to honor Jewish notables (from Brandeis Univ. and beyond) who supported revisionist state Holocaust policies (and received high state medals for these activities). But the lucrative summer course continued, via Indiana University’s Borns Jewish Studies Program, until 2018. The Vilnius Yiddish Institute website and its rich archive were taken down and replaced in 2019 by a weird and inadequate definition of Yiddish (archived), with zero explanation of what happened to the institute that thousands of people had given to over close to two decades. There is now widespread concern about the institute’s rich library and archive, donated by hundreds of generous donors over many years (including many rare volumes in Lithuanian Jewish studies, particularly primary sources on interwar Jewish Vilna) who believed they were giving to a permanent library that would be cherished in perpetuity by the recipient university institution in an EU/NATO capital city. Now one can only hope that these treasures will without delay be transferred to one of the functioning Judaica libraries in Vilnius, perhaps the National Library, where local and international readers alike can readily access these materials. Updates here. The entry remains on this page because of (a) the library wrongfully placed beyond use; (b) the “information” repeatedly given inquirers, in the classic spirit of “Soviet information” that the institute has been “deposited [‘deponuotas’] temporarily and is right now beyond use”… Transfer of the unique VYI library to an active and accessible library would solve things rapidly and gracefully, with no need for invoking a conflictual past.]

 

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Why Was Richard Maullin, Head of California ISO, Honored by the Foreign Minister of Lithuania?



O P I N I O N

LOS ANGELES—Richard A. Maullin, elected less than a year ago as the chair of the California Independent System Operator (ISO) Board, was lavishly honored here on May 31st by both the Lithuanian ambassador to the United States and the Foreign Minister of Lithuania. The latter, in the tradition of royalty, meticulously placed the Lithuanian Diplomatic Star around the neck of Dr. Maullin, a major American pollster and principal of the LA polling and public policy research firm FM3, often still known by its older name Fairbank, Maslin, Maullin, Metz & Associates.

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Posted in "Jewish" Events as Cover?, Double Games, Foreign Ministries: Holocaust Politics Abuse?, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, Richard Maullin, United States, Views of Prof. Sarunas Liekis, Vilnius Yiddish Institute, Yiddish Affairs | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Why Was Richard Maullin, Head of California ISO, Honored by the Foreign Minister of Lithuania?

Documents from a Curious History of a Yiddish Professorship at Vilnius University


 


APOLOGIES, THIS PAGE HAS MOVED HERE

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Could WJC get Ensnared in “Yiddish” as Cover for Holocaust Revisionism in Lithuania?



O P I N I O N

A recent report, also available as PDF, suggests sudden and deep involvement of the World Jewish Congress in the Lithuanian government’s repeatedly documented use of Yiddish, Judaic studies and even Holocaust studies as means to advance — or cover for — state-sponsored Double Genocide revisionism with respect to the essential narrative of the Holocaust. The report has proven to be disturbing for the wider Holocaust survivor community and its supporters.

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Posted in "Jewish" Events as Cover?, "Red-Brown Commission", Double Games, Double Genocide, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, South Africa, Vilnius Yiddish Institute, World Jewish Congress (WJC) and ORT, Yiddish Affairs | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Could WJC get Ensnared in “Yiddish” as Cover for Holocaust Revisionism in Lithuania?

WJC Executive Director Michael Schneider Goes on the Record in Vilnius, about Yiddish and Secret Donor


The following is a reprint of the interview given by Michael Schneider, executive director of the World Jewish Congress, dated 9 April 2014 and posted shortly thereafter on the website of the Jewish Community of Lithuania (PDF here).

UPDATE: See Section on WJC and ORT Yiddish involvement in Vilnius. Open letters to the WJC from Milan Chersonski, Daniel Galay, Regina Kopilevich, Prof. Olegas Poliakovas.


 

World Jewish Congress and Lithuanian Jewish Community Attention to and Support for the Vilnius Yiddish Institute

 April 9, 2014

SchneiderisMICHAEL SCHNEIDERIS

Michael Schneider, a well-known leader of the World Jewish Congress and former executive director of WJC and the JDC (Joint), is currently visiting the Lithuanian Jewish Community. Discussions are taking place at the community on improving and expanding the activity of the Vilnius Yiddish Institute at Vilnius University and changes in its administration.

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Posted in "Jewish" Events as Cover?, News & Views, Politics of Memory, Vilnius Yiddish Institute, World Jewish Congress (WJC) and ORT, Yiddish Affairs | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on WJC Executive Director Michael Schneider Goes on the Record in Vilnius, about Yiddish and Secret Donor

Yiddish Roulette? One Resigns in Bloomington, Another Rides In from Buffalo


Sources in Bloomington, Indiana and Vilnius, Lithuania, confirmed this week that Dr. Daniel R. Berg, an eminent physician in the greater Bloomington area, has resigned from the rump “Board of Friends” of Sarunas Liekis’s “Vilnius Yiddish Institute” (VYI). The institute’s website abruptly removed Dr. Berg’s name and photograph from the board. No letter of resignation was released to the media, but a source close to the doctor said he was dismayed to see the institute’s resources being dedicated to a campaign of defamation against its own former Yiddish professor and founder, whose name and contributions have been deleted from the historic faculty page, in the classic Soviet style of revising history.

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Posted in "Jewish" Events as Cover?, Bloomington-Borns Program Manipulated?, Double Games, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, Richard Maullin, United States, Vilnius Yiddish Institute, Yiddish Affairs | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Yiddish Roulette? One Resigns in Bloomington, Another Rides In from Buffalo

Wiesenthal Center’s Israel Office Releases 2007 Correspondence with LA Board Chief of Vilnius Yiddish Institute



Editor’s note: The Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Israel office today released for the record the following September 2007 email exchange with the director of the Los Angeles based “Friends of the Vilnius Yiddish Institute” (VYI).

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Posted in Documents, Efraim Zuroff, News & Views, Opinion, Richard Maullin, United States, Vilnius Yiddish Institute, Yiddish Affairs | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Wiesenthal Center’s Israel Office Releases 2007 Correspondence with LA Board Chief of Vilnius Yiddish Institute

Red-Brown Commission Member Takes Katz-Bashing Campaign to Litvak Culture Fest in Philadephia; LA Next?



O P I N I O N

A senior historian and his government’s “master fixer for foreign Jewish academics,” Professor Sarunas Liekis told an audience of hundreds in Philadelphia last Sunday that Dovid Katz had never been a professor of Yiddish at Vilnius University, and had been discontinued in 2010 by the American Friends of the Vilnius Yiddish Institute (led by Richard Maullin of Los Angeles) for not having turned up for class for several years (!).

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Posted in "Jewish" Events as Cover?, A 21st Century Campaign Against Lithuanian Holocaust Survivors?, Double Games, Events, News & Views, Opinion, Richard Maullin, Views of Prof. Sarunas Liekis, Vilnius Yiddish Institute, What Do Fake Litvak Games Look Like?, Yiddish Affairs | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Red-Brown Commission Member Takes Katz-Bashing Campaign to Litvak Culture Fest in Philadephia; LA Next?

EHU Center for German Studies: “Colloquium Vilnense 2013” is Short on “The Second Opinion” when it comes to The Holocaust



O P I N I O N

by Dovid Katz

 

Colleagues at the prestigious European Humanities University in Vilnius (EHU, also known as the Belarusian Humanities University, in exile here in Vilnius) have passed on the public poster for this year’s series of seminars under the title Colloquium vilnense 2013, running from May to November 2013. The A3 size poster is reproduced (much reduced) at the bottom of this page in two halves.

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Posted in "Jewish" Events as Cover?, Documents, Double Games, Dovid Katz, EU, Events, Free Speech & Democracy, Germany, Lithuania, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, Vilnius Yiddish Institute, Yiddish Affairs | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on EHU Center for German Studies: “Colloquium Vilnense 2013” is Short on “The Second Opinion” when it comes to The Holocaust

Bloomington-Borns Jewish Studies Arranges for 2nd Right-Wing Soviet-Israeli Self Publishing Poet to be “Professor of Yiddish in Vilnius”


Through the good offices of the Borns Jewish Studies program at Indiana University (Bloomington), and its Dr. Alice Field Cohn Chair Yiddish studies professor, D.B. Kerler (“Boris Karloff”), who allegedly knifed his own doctoral supervisor in pursuit of a summer position in Vilnius (despite having a tenured position in the US), a comrade Soviet-Israeli self-publishing Yiddish poet has been announced as visiting professor of Yiddish on the home page of the Vilnius Yiddish Institute. Both have in some views allowed themselves to be instrumentalized by the right-wing Holocaust-revisionist establishment that seeks to cover for state policies including rampant antisemitism and the “Double Genocide” campaign via events and stunts in the field of Yiddish and Jewish studies.

According to the announcement, Dr. Velvl Chernin is now the “visiting professor” of Yiddish at the Vilnius Yiddish Institute, which was purged of full-time Jewish staff in 2010 and has been criticized for being Yiddish-free for eleven months of the year.

That situation has apparently now been remedied by the appointment of Dr. Chernin, who, it is announced,

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Posted in Bloomington-Borns Program Manipulated?, Double Games, Identity Theft of Litvak Heritage, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Vilnius Yiddish Institute, Yiddish Affairs | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Bloomington-Borns Jewish Studies Arranges for 2nd Right-Wing Soviet-Israeli Self Publishing Poet to be “Professor of Yiddish in Vilnius”

Vilnius University Calls Antisemitic, Racist, Homophobic Artist “Humanistic” as 9 Young Lithuanians Protest; Yiddish Institute, US Backers, Bloomington-Borns — All Silent



Left to right: Sigita Rukšėnaitė, Anna Shepherd, Fiokla Kiure. Sign at right asks: “Just Envelopes?”

A dedicated Facebook page provides facts and photos on today’s dignified and courageous demonstration by a small group of young Lithuanian human rights advocates against Vilnius University’s proceeding with an exhibition of an envelope designer whose work features flagrant antisemitic, homophobic and racist material (larger selection here).

Fiokla Kiure’s images of the event are available here; a small selection  follows this article.

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Posted in Antisemitism & Bias, Bloomington-Borns Program Manipulated?, LGBTQ Equal Rights, Lithuania, News & Views, Opinion, Racism, Richard Maullin, Russian Speakers' Personal Status, Vilnius Yiddish Institute, Yiddish Affairs | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Vilnius University Calls Antisemitic, Racist, Homophobic Artist “Humanistic” as 9 Young Lithuanians Protest; Yiddish Institute, US Backers, Bloomington-Borns — All Silent

When Government Honors are Part of a Plan to Rewrite History


“אַ מעדאַל פון אחשוורושן„

Can history be bought with state budgets? Can awards and honors from high officials of the Lithuanian government for Western and Jewish personalities provide public cover for the campaign to diminish and downgrade the history of the Holocaust in accordance with Baltic Holocaust revisionism?

NOTE: There is no suggestion that any of those honored, all eminent persons, realized that they were being elevated with ulterior motives. But the de-facto linkage of honors with espousal of varying aspects of red-brown revisionism (and/or simply to join in discrediting colleagues who disagree with Lithuanian government policies) makes way for disturbing questions, given the state investment in the politics of the Prague Declaration and Double Genocide. Persons entangled in the campaign would no doubt wish to be made aware of the wider patterning, with absolutely no disrespect.



AMERICAN JEWISH COMMITTEE (AJC) IN VILNIUS: President of Lithuania awards American Jewish Committee CEO David Harris high cross and medal in 2021 for decades of works for Lithuania. These have included underpinning and legitimizing the “red-brown commission” that spearheads Holocaust revisionism and that has caused so much pain to Holocaust survivors and their families for a quarter century. His AJC colleague Andy Baker has beat him (please scroll down) by winning two separate medals after decades of undermining local Jewish people and survivors in favor of state-chosen Jewish leaders. Whether it is a project to construct a national convention center in the heart of the Old Vilna cemetery, to cancel out the democratically elected community in favor of a fake-election gov. chosen elite, or to downgrade and relativize the Holocaust via “double genocide” revisionism using a “historic commission” the American Jewish Committee “has always been there for decades” to betray local Jewish people and causes, pursuing the personal motives of endless junkets, photo-ops, banquets and, of course, medals to take home for a handful of glorified leaders.

Time for the ACJ to appoint an internal commission of inquiry, or for outside journalists to investigate properly? Please see Defending History’s section on the role of the AJC in Lithuania over the years.


After a decade of betraying Holocaust survivors, helping cover for the glorification of collaborators, and betraying the Yiddish language that Yivo was created to support, Yivo CEO Dr. Jonathan Brent was awarded the Cross of the Knight of the Order in 2019 by the president of  Lithuania for “promotion” of the government’s PR interests  in 2019.  Shortly thereafter, he fired all of the New York Yivo’s librarians. See the heartfelt pleas over the years from Vilnius survivors including Milan Chersonski and Pinchos Fridberg.


 

Vilnius, Lithuania, May 2012:  Lithuanian Foreign Minister HE Audronius Ažubalis honors American historian Timothy Snyder during the week when  the 1941 Nazi puppet prime minister was reburied by the state with full honors.  An open letter to Prof. Snyder. Respectfully disagreeing with some aspects of his recent book.

Washington DC, Oct. 2014: the Gold Star from the embassy finally comes:

lithuanian-diplomatic-star-being-awarded-to-professor-snyder-photo-ludo-66236254 (1)


Washington, DC, March 2012: Ellen Cassedy’s book We are Here is launched at the Lithuanian Embassy in Washington DC by the nation’s ambassador, HE Zygimantas Pavilonis, who did not, however, respond to public petitions to halt his nation’s city-center neo-Nazi march that month, or subsequent requests for the removal of state sponsored memorials to Nazi killers and collaborators. Reviews of the book here and here. The Lithuanian edition is being rushed through the press. In a 2012 interview, Ms. Cassedy stated: “I went to Lithuania, hoping to decide who was right and who was wrong; to put people in a column, who was a victim, who was a killer. And then those lines began to blur.”

Recommended reviews of Ms. Cassedy’s book:

Efraim Zuroff in Haaretz; Olga Zabludoff in Defending HistoryAllan Nadler in the ForwardDovid Katz in Algemeiner Journal


 

Vilnius, Lithuania, January 2012: Professor Antony Polonsky, one of the world’s leading historians of Polish Jewry, is awarded the Cross of the Officer of the Order for Merits to Lithuania by the president of the Republic of Lithuania HE Dalia Grybiauskaitė, after helping fudge the Rachel Margolis case and shifting by some degrees the acceptable definition of “genocide” to the liking of the Lithuanian government. Details here.

A few months later, the same honor guard welcomed to Lithuania, for reburial with full honors amid gala events, the remains of the 1941 Nazi puppet prime minister who signed papers confirming orders for Jewish citizens of his city, Kaunas, to be sent to a murder camp, and then for all the rest to be incarcerated in a ghetto within one month. There was no public comment from the decorated professor who went on to headline Lithuanian government sponsored PR roadshows in the United States.


 

Washington, DC, November 2011: Harley Felstein (right) is effectively crowned king of the (vassal) Litvaks by the Lithuanian ambassador to the United States (center) and his plenipotentiary (left). The “king” went on to co-author a PR op-ed that included a shocking pro-fascist reinterpretation of the history of the Holocaust (crediting the view that the initial murderers who unleashed the Lithuanian Holocaust were actually freedom fighters). It drew a swift response. More details in the comments section to a VilNews article, in a later discussion following a Forward article, and a DeeHist.com report.

UPDATE:

See now Paul Berger’s exposé in the Forward (as PDF).


Vilnius, Lithuania c. 2006. Rabbi Andrew Baker of the American Jewish Committee receives the Cross of the Officers Award of Merit from President Valdas Adamkus, who also used his tenure in office to rehabilitate an array of local Nazi war criminals. Details here. Rabbi Baker continues to lend “Jewish cred” to the “red-brown commission.” Resignations to date from the commission and its committee of experts include Sir Martin Gilbert (London), Prof. Gershon Greenberg (Washington, DC), Prof. Konrad Kwiet (Sydney) and Prof. Dov Levin (Jerusalem).

UPDATE: In 2012, the foreign minister of Lithuania followed up the previous president’s cross with a new award : the Lithuanian Star of Diplomacy. This foreign minister’s record included antisemitic outbursts, the infamous “moustache”  response to the Seventy Years Declaration, support for the state sponsored reburial with full honors of the 1941 Nazi puppet prime minister and publication of a plan to (ab)use the 2013 presidency of the European Union to push the “unified history” (i.e. red-brown-for-all) agenda.

UPDATE: In 2020, three elected members of the Board of the Vilnius Jewish Community, representing the vast majority of living Jewish citizens in Lithuania, wrote to Rabbi Baker about the diversion away from Jewish interests of the millions in restitution governed by the “Good Will Foundation” of which Rabbi Baker has been a permanent co-chair. Read their public letter on Facebook [as PDF], and judge yourself Rabbi Andrew Baker’s diplomatic reply).

Do the American Jewish Committee’s donors know of the pain and damage he and the AJC has caused to Jewish people and causes in Lithuania?  Please see Defending History’s section on the role of the AJC in Lithuania over the years.

The American Jewish Committee (AJC) had this announcement on its website (screenshot of 11 October 2012):


 

Professor Evan Zimroth of the City University of New York (Queens College) is an accomplished author and educator with a long record of civic activity. Here she is awarded the millennial star at the Lithuanian consulate in New York by Foreign Minister Vygaudas Ušackas in September 2009 (see his 2011 published comments on the period of Nazi rule in Lithuania). She has since circulated personal attacks, complete with conspiratorial suppositions, against those who deign to criticize current Lithuanian government policies on Jewish affairs.


 

Vilnius, Lithuania, March 2006. Dr. Richard Maullin  honored at the event to unveil the new plaque in his honor naming the main study area of the Vilnius Yiddish Institute as the Richard Maullin Study Hall (in the absence of any endowment or capital sum to the university or its institutes). Dr. Maullin and his partner Natasha (Natalia) Yatskevich, and high figures from Vilnius University were in attendance. Dr. Maullin had a year earlier purchased the “shares” of the Yiddish institute for US $25,000 from Israeli resident Mendy Cahan, a co-founder of the institute. Dr. Maullin, recruited by Lithuanian government-friendly forces after the 2008 start of “The Troubles,” failed to even respond politely to letters of concern about the institute’s purges that were coming from Western ambassadors in 2009, and from the Israeli embassy. Maullin duly fulfilled the Lithuanian government’s “requirement” that his institute be purged to staff who disagree with the state’s Holocaust revisionism policies. Since 2010, his “Yiddish institute” has had no full-time Jewish members of academic staff, no full-time Yiddish specialist, and it has become a PR tool of the far right’s history-revisionism agenda.

A further crunch came in September 2012 when Vilnius University mounted a major exhibit by an antisemitic, homophobic artist a few yards from his institute. Dr. Maullin and his remaining board of three remained silent. He and Ms. Yatskevich have been feted in Vilnius on numerous occasions. In recent years, he has been appointed by California’s Governor Jerry Brown to the California Independent System Operator Board of Governors. In December 2013, Dr. Berg resigned from the Board as a matter of principle, leaving T. Lunson, R. Maullin, and D. Opatoshu.

Finally, after five years of maintaining a “purged Yiddish institute” that exists for Lithuanian government propaganda, Maullin received the highest accolade yet for his political loyalty. He was honored by the Lithuanian Foreign Ministry (not the culture ministry….)  in California where the Foreign Minister of Lithuania put the Lithuanian Diplomatic Star around his neck, and he was photographed for posterity between the foreign minister and the Lithuanian ambassador to the United States, together with Mrs. Natasha Maullin and other guests (DH report).

foreign-minister-linkevicius-awarding-lithuanian-diplomatic-star-to-dr-68120474

Maullinhonored


 

Yiddish professors Dov-Ber Kerler (Bloomington, Indiana; also a famous poet) and Anna Verschik (Tallinn, Estonia) are featured on t-shirts extolling (in Yiddish) “Lithuania” and “Vilnius” as part of the Vilnius Yiddish Institute where both cheerfully cover each summer for Lithuanian nationalist officials’ disemployment of the institute’s founder and only resident Yiddish professor who was for years a Yiddish teacher of both t-shirt honorees. The political instrumentalization of Yiddish by far right state-sponsored bodies remains a concern for the fragile field of Yiddish studies, particularly in Eastern Europe.

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“Prime Minister” of Lithuania’s 1941 Nazi Puppet Government to be Glorified, Re-interred and Subject of a Commemorative Conference at Vytautas Magnus University


VILNIUS—In a move causing anguish and an aura of disbelief among Holocaust survivors and their families, and Lithuania’s small Jewish community, the remains of a major 1941 collaborator of Nazi rule will be re-interred this month with full honors during a series of events designed to honor him, and by extension, wider institutionalized local Nazi collaboration.

Lithuanian media, including BNS, Bernardinai.ltKauno diena and 15min.lt have reported that the remains of Juozas Brazaitis (Ambrazevičius), who died in the United States in 1974, will be re-interred from Putnam, Connecticut, to the Church of the Resurrection in Kaunas this month. En route, he will be honored in the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, in a ceremony slated for 17 May. In a statement, Andrius Kupčinskas, the mayor of Kaunas, said: “Every head of state must be honored by the state.”

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March 11th: A Grand Opportunity for the Lithuanian Human Rights Community — and the People of Vilnius



O P I N I O N

by Dovid Katz

When three of us from the DefendingHistory.com community headed out from Vilnius on February 16th to confront the neo-Nazi march in central Kaunas, we were sure we would be joined by dozens, or more, true lovers of Lithuania  —  folks who cannot remain silent that perverted political leadership allows today’s neo-Nazis to achieve free reign in the center of a great city in the middle of the nation’s cherished independence day. Folks who cannot let the glorification of stylized swastikas (including the “Lithuanian swastika“), and white armbands (celebrating the LAF Holocaust perpetrators of 1941) go unchallenged in the country with the largest rate of murder of its civilian Jewish population in all Holocaust-era Europe. Folks who want to send at least some modicum of support to today’s minorities. And a message to the world that the neo-Nazis do not represent Lithuanian society.

It was a shock to find in Kaunas on February 16th, that the somewhat quixotic DefendingHistory.com threesome would find itself the only visible anti-Nazi presence during the march and the rally that followed.

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Was the OSCE’s (ODIHR) ‘High Level Meeting on Confronting Antisemitism’ another East European Whitewash?


The OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) today released its report on the ‘OSCE High Level Meeting on Confronting Antisemitism in Public Discourse’ that was held in Prague on 23 and 24 March 2011 under the auspices of its ODIHR department (Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights). The full report is available here (alternate link here).

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