Members of the US-based “Litvak SIG” (both those on the free lists, and those who paid their $36 a year dues for full membership), have been informed of the following event and the book it features, coming up this Thursday evening in San Francisco. (When Messiah will come, the subscribers to both “SIG” sections will learn about the existence of Defending History, too and its modest, but free, Litvak interest sections. We must have patience.)
(Reposted from today’s Jerusalem Post)
Three events took place this weekend which reflect the ambiguities of contemporary Jewish life in the Baltics and particularly in Lithuania, the largest of the three new democracies. In reverse order, on Sunday, ultra-nationalist groups staged an Independence Day march, which included anti-Semitic themes, in Kaunas (Kovno), Lithuania’s interwar capital and the country’s second largest city.Continue reading
Dr. Efraim Zuroff, Holocaust historian, Nazi-hunter, and director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Israel office, has posted the following comment on the website of Tablet magazine, as one of the comments to a new book review. The comment also appears separately on Facebook.
Dr. Efraim Zuroff, director of the the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Israel office
Even if I were Superman I wouldn’t be able to bring to justice all remaining Nazis. Of course not. It is impossible. Nobody can do it. But if you ask me what is better — a bit of justice or injustice, I would always say — a bit of justice. You know, to me it is clear that even when the last Nazi dies, a battle is not over, because it begins over and over again.
And it is a battle with history which is more important than people may think and understand. Facing the history with sincerity is the best way to build a better future, says Efraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem, while answering a question on whether he thinks that he would be able to bring to justice all remaining Nazis.
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).
Камушек на «могилу» бабушки, дедушки, родных со стороны матери
Понар (Paneriai), 23 сентября 2013 года, 11 : 35
In a statement issued in Jerusalem today, the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Israel director Dr. Efraim Zuroff noted two major flaws in a recent report issued by the state-sponsored Genocide Center in Vilnius, Lithuania. The report’s key findings, presented by the Center’s Dr. Alfredas Rukšėnas, were published by the Lithuanian news portal Delfi on 25 October 2013 (English translation available in Defending History).
According to Dr. Zuroff:
“The findings of the report, as presented by the coordinator of this project, are clearly part of a systematic attempt by the Lithuanian government to minimize the role of ethnic Lithuanians in the mass murder of Jews during the Holocaust. Based on the records in our archives, I can unequivocally state, that the figure of 2,055 Lithuanians whose direct and indirect participation in Holocaust crimes was confirmed by this study, is a gross underestimate of the number of Lithuanians complicit in Shoah crimes, designed to deflect blame from local collaborators and hide the extensive scope of Lithuanian involvement in the mass murder of Jews, both in Lithuania and outside her borders.
“Also highly objectionable is the assertion by Dr. Rukšėnas that those Lithuanians who indeed murdered Jews really had no choice but to do so, having received orders to commit murder from their superiors. Besides the fact that in many cases, these superiors were themselves Lithuanians, such arguments have been consistently and unequivocally rejected by courts all over the world, starting with the Nuremberg Trials.”
Good evening,
Attorney Yosef Melamed asked me to update you regarding the recent events which have taken place since the last memorial event a year ago, concerning the attempts by the Lithuanian government to distort the history of the Holocaust and to minimize or deny the participation of many Lithuanians in the murder of Jews, not only in Lithuania but also beyond its borders.
I’ve never met Christine Beresniova, but I’ve followed her career, so to speak, through the media and mutual acquaintances, and wish her only the best. She first came to my attention after apparently making some very limited and not very public criticisms of Lithuanian Holocaust education, which sufficiently pissed off the Holocaust Obfuscation establishment ensconced within the corridors of state power for them to label her some kind of Russian agent in informal conversations.
From today’s Times of Israel.
The visit to Israel of a foreign prime minister used to be a big deal. That’s why there were so many photos of Burmese head of state U Nu’s visit in the early sixties. Those days, however, are long gone and today when most prime ministers visit us it’s usually of little or no interest to anybody and they get almost no coverage unless they are major world figures.
That would help explain why I only found out Tuesday morning that Estonian Prime Minister Andrus Ansip was to be touring Yad Vashem that day.
Ostensibly, that is no occasion of any particular significance, and the visit is more or less a pro forma requirement for any head of state coming to Israel in that capacity, especially if he or she has never been here before. But that is not true in the case of the Estonian leader, who heads a country that is suffering from a severe Baltic variant of post-Communist Eastern European Holocaust amnesia. This is an intellectual disease whose four main characteristics are a systematic minimization of crimes by local Nazi collaborators, a distinct lack of political will to prosecute and punish such individuals, a tendency to glorify locals who fought alongside the Nazis – in Estonia’s case in Waffen-SS units – and a determination to promote the historical canard of supposed equivalency between Nazi and Communist crimes.
MEP Vytautas Landsbergis, former speaker of the Lithuanian parliament and leader of the Lithuanian independence movement in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, unveiled his latest polemic at a ceremony cum press conference held on the first floor of the Signatarų Namai building in Vilnius’s Old Town on September 11, 2012, the historic site where Lithuanian independence was proclaimed from the balcony to the street below sometime around February 16, 1918.
This small book—there’s only 22 pages written by Landsbergis, the rest is a motley collection of supposedly historic documents—is an attempt to answer criticism of the Lithuanian Government and Catholic Church’s ceremonial reburial of Lithuanian Nazi puppet prime minister Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis and other concurrent celebrations in the spring of 2012.
- April 2010: The Wiesenthal Center’s Dr. Efraim Zuroff comments (in the Guardian) on the American ambassador’s assurance that “The United States and Lithuania are partners in the fight against antisemitism and in efforts to address the legacy of the Holocaust” bereft of any mention of the “slight problems,” e.g. state-sanctioned neo-Nazi marches on independence day, attempted prosecution of Holocaust survivors, glorification of Nazi perpetrators, disturbing comments by top officials and a general decline into the acceptability of antisemitism.
- Continue reading
This week, one of the more shameful events in Lithuanian-Jewish relations since the Baltic republic regained independence in 1991 will be hosted in New York by the once-venerable Yivo Institute. Under the heading “Reclaiming the Jewish Narrative in Lithuania Today,” the Yiddish research institute will host Markas Zingeris, whom it describes as a “Lithuanian-Jewish poet and writer,” to speak about relations between Jews and Lithuanians since the fall of Communism.
Efraim Zuroff, the Holocaust historian, Nazi-hunter and author, today posted the following message on his Facebook page. It is reproduced here with the permission of Dr. Zuroff, who is director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center Israel office and its Operation Last Chance. For more on the alleged US embassy (Vilnius) blackballing of Dr. Zuroff from an international 2011 summer program in Vilnius see here. Background to the Yivo event: see Milan Chersonski’s article.
This is a call for action to those in the NYC area. This coming Tuesday, October 16 at 7 PM, YIVO is hosting an evening at the Center for Jewish History at 15 West 16th St. entitled “Reclaiming The Jewish Narrative in Lithuania Today.” The problem is that the featured guests are all supporters of the Lithuanian government’s efforts to promote the canard of equivalency between Communist and Nazi crimes and are minimizing the huge role of Lithuanians in the mass murder of Lithuanian Jews. Anyone able to go and confront Markas Zingeris, the Lithuanian PM’s advisor on genocide, and former US ambassador to Lithuania Anne Derse whose embassy blackballed my participation in a seminar on Lithuanian Jewish history at the request of the Lithuanian authorities, will be doing a big mitzva!!!
Unfortunately, this excellent article by David Mikics focuses almost exclusively on Poland, which for historical reasons is not the place where Snyder’s Bloodlands totally fails to present a historical account of the reality of the Holocaust. A far better place would be the Baltics in general, and Lithuania in particular. In these countries, three important phenomena took place:
NOTE: This is an authorized republication of today’s letter, which first appeared in the online Algemeiner Journal. [Update: It then appeared in the AJ’s print edition on 25 May, pp. 2, 4, 5.]
Dear Tim,
Greetings, and sorry we missed each other in Vilnius this time. I write in the context of our ongoing and respectful conversation, which started in the Guardian (thanks to Matt Seaton, and prominently including Efraim Zuroff) back in 2010 (I, II, III, IV); continuing through our meeting at Yale, the Aftermath Conference in Melbourne, Australia, in 2011 (thanks to Mark Baker, and with participation of Jan Gross and Patrick Desbois), and more recently, via my review of your book Bloodlands (along with Alexander Prusin’s The Lands Between), in East European Jewish Affairs.
BUT WHO IS MR. ZEPPELINUS IN REAL LIFE? COULD HE BE A HIGH FIGURE IN AN EU COUNTRY’S ECONOMY MINISTRY?
MONTAGE OF HIS RACIST, MISOGYNISTIC, HOMOPHOBIC, HATE-FILLED “ART”
◊
2019 far-right death threats against DH editor appear on Facebook (as PDF; transl.)
They were apparently again inspired 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 Nazi collaborator who is also a prime icon for today’s neo-Nazis.
21 October 2018. Zeppelinus releases photoshop of Defending History’s editor, who is accused of teaching his students about an alleged Nazi collaborator, together with Lithuania’s foreign minister, Linas Linkevicius, who is attacked for having agreed with the international community that plaques and honors for confirmed Nazi collaborator Jonas Noreika should be taken down. See report.
27 May 2017. Zeppelinus in his blog publishes a montage of a 2015 Holocaust history conference photo of Dovid Katz speaking with session co-chairs Ruta Vanagaite and Simon Gurevich sitting behind, with a pasted-in Putinist hand pulling the strings, suggesting that discourse on the Holocaust from the Western and Jewish perspectives constitutes a form of “Putinism” . . . Background here.
4 October 2015. Zeppelinus in his blog takes a photo of our editor on Gediminas’s castle in Vilnius with the Aramaic curse Pulso d’nuro pasted in as speech bubble….
After monitoring of the 11 March 2015 neo-Nazi parade in central Vinius, at a Facebook page.
1 April 2013. April Fool’s Day image featured on the Zeppelinus site, and the FB blog pages of both Zeppelinus and Mr. Vytenis Petrusevičius.
♦
25 February 2013. Journalist on “mainstream” Balsas.lt site calls for Efraim Zuroff and Dovid Katz to be delivered for being torn apart [by wolves].
♦
22 February 2013. Article in XXI amzius (“21st Century”) on “Youth Organized March in Kaunas” with complaints about the “American Zionist Jewish character Katz.” As the first image in the article correctly shows, the lead banner at the Kaunas march honored the 1941 Nazi puppet Kaunas-based prime minister J. Ambrazevicius (Brazaitis), who was reburied by the state with full honors in 2012. The third photo shows “Katz collecting ‘evidence’ with recorder and camera”…
♦
2012/2013. From the neo-Nazi site Stormfront (click on image for source):
♦
19 February 2013. “Dialogued” image of Evaldas Balčiūnas and Dovid Katz who were among the handful of protesters at the February 16th neo-Nazi independence day march in Kaunas. On Blogeris Zeppelinus for February 19th, also on E. Girskis’s page for February 18th.
♦
16 February 2013. On the page of the Lithuanian Union of Nationalist Youth following the neo-Nazi march in Kaunas that day. Note: the Union, which receives government and (indirect) EU (!) support, organizes neo-Nazi marches among its other activities, and was recently honored in the Lithuanian parliament. The Union’s and similar activities were exposed in 2011 by two courageous Lithuanian journalists: Eglė Samoškaitė and Dovilė Tuskenytė (report).
♦
February 2013. Zeppelinus “discovers” a photograph (from 2009) picturing the Jewish Community’s deputy chairperson Faina Kukliansky, Defending History’s editor (these two being helpfully marked and kindly captioned…) along with an American diplomat, a Lithuanian diplomat, and anti-Nazi partisan veteran Professor Sara Ginaite (center). Professor Ginaite ignored prosecutors’ intimidation to return to Lithuania for a visit to her native land.
♦
1 February 2013. The “Dovid on the Motorcycle” photoshopped image appears on various sites, including the Lithuanian Nationalist Union of Youth / Lietuvių tautinio jaunimo sąjunga (see above at 16 February 2013); Blogeris Zeppelinus for 28 January 2013; Facebook, 2. Our reader Dr. J. Breeze, UK, found the apparent source in a Hagrid image.
♦
♦
13 March 2012. Tomas Bombadilas / Facebook. Followed around town (not just on this day…) and photographed in a Vilnius cafe, having a drink with an old friend…
♦
12 March 2012. Zeppelinius.livejournal.com. Doctored photo of giving a visiting card to old friend encountered before the neo-Nazi march in Vilnius on 11 March 2012. The neo-Nazi blog contains details on my old friend’s family history, including the heroic military service of his late parents in the Red Army, as part of the British-American-Soviet alliance that brought down Hitler and Nazi Germany.
♦
10 March 2012. Lrytas.lt [comments on article].
29 February 2012. Patriotai.lt. DK in the car arriving at the demonstration…
♦
17 February 2012. Patriotai.lt.
♦
17 February 2012. M1M22M333M on YouTube.
♦
16 February 2012. Alkas.lt. Monitoring the monitor at the neo-Nazi events on 16 February 2012 in Kaunas.
♦
The well-camouflaged extremists among “mainstream nationalist intellectuals” feed right into synergistic de-facto augmentation of the far right’s campaign of personal and professional destruction against residents of Lithuania who stand up on Holocaust-related issues. By contrast, the environment is fulsomely democratic and tolerant of diversity of viewpoints on nearly every other issue.
See for example the 2011 discourse on a Facebook page dedicated to “anti-Nazi” activity (original Lithuanian; English translation. A major intellectual, Vytautas Toleikis accuses D. Katz of “poisoning their subconscious, essentially employing black arts” (some translate the employed phrase as “black magic”) to control and hypnotize Jews abroad and the local Jewish community (!) as well as being a tool of “Russian-Jewish” organizations (this was during Defending History’s concentration on prosecutors’ charges against Holocaust survivors and state glorification of Holocaust collaborators). See Defending History’s summary of the saga). Mr. Toleikis, widely suspected of hiding his own Jewish family roots, frequently wins major prizes for “tolerance” (like all parties mentioned in this journal, is invited to respond on these pages; see DH’s Authors).
16 February 2012. Lrytas.lt [comments on article].
31 January 2012. R. Račinskas on a radio panel discussion.
MORE IMAGES
A FIRST-TIME PARTNERSHIP BETWEEN LEYVIK HOUSE YIDDISH CULTURE CENTER, THE SIMON WIESENTHAL CENTER ISRAEL OFFICE AND THE ASSOCIATION OF LITHUANIAN JEWS IN ISRAEL
Holocaust survivors Shlomo Cheskov (left, from Shavl/Šiauliai), and Joseph Melamed (from Kovno/Kaunas) at the Tel Aviv demonstration. Mr. Cheskov’s sign says (in Yiddish) “With our partisan heroes, against neo-Nazism. We are here!” Mr. Melamed’s (in Hebrew) addressed to the South African businessmen diners at the gala dinner: “Dear Diners! Where is your conscience? Your solidarity with Holocaust survivors and resistance fighters and partisans?” Photo: Bella Bryks-Klein.
