COLLABORATORS GLORIFIED | BOLD LITHUANIAN CITIZENS SPEAK OUT | CHRISTIAN-JEWISH RELATIONS
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Lithuania’s Mažvydas National Library is curiously fostering two parallel cultures which have yet to engage each other. Up on the fifth floor, on the West side, an eminent Judaic studies scholar leads the Judaica Research Center (cosponsored by the Yivo institute in New York), and on the East side, journalist Vidmantas Valiušaitis leads the Adolfas Damušis Democracy Studies Center.
More on Mažvydas National Library; on Yivo’s history in Vilnius since 2011
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 Lithuania; Seven Kingdoms of the Litvaks; Windows to a Lost Jewish World
[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…]
[UPDATE OF MAY 2024: The chief executive of the World Yiddish Center established as a “permanent” fixture in Vilnius reported to us that the World Jewish Congress decided to close it down and use its Vilnius base for its other projects.]