Did “Double Genocide” from the “Prague Declaration” Land Under the Radar in the United States Congress?
PAIN IS EXACERBATED AS PLOY COINCIDES WITH 70TH ANNIVERSARY OF D DAY EVENTS
- By stealth out of the East?
Tag Archives: Efraim Zuroff
“Double Genocide” Snuck into Congress?
Posted in 70 Years Declaration, Double Genocide: The New Form of Holocaust Revisionism & Denial, History, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Politics of Memory, United States, US State Dept Manipulated?, Yitzhak Arad
Tagged 70th Anniversary of D-Day, Abraham Cooper, D-Day + Baltic countries, Efraim Zuroff, Holocaust + US Congress, Holocaust revisionism + Congress, Holocaust Survivors in 2014, Jewish issues + US Congress, Lithuanian Embassy in Washington DC, Seventy Years Declaration, Yehuda Bauer, Yitzhak Arad
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Respublika “Slightly” Edits Efraim Zuroff’s Obituary for Shimon Alperovich
M E D I A W A T C H
Vitas Tomkus’s daily tabloid, Respublika has, alongside its sister title, Vakaro Žinios (Evening News, also owned by Tomkus) in many views inflicted tangible damage upon Lithuania and its image. The papers leave a long trail of racist, antisemitic, and homophobic invective, not seldom in sensationalistic formats that mirror the 1930s.
The most notorious instance was perhaps the 2004 front page featuring the unseemly cartoon of the The Jew and The Gay holding up a globe under the headline “Who runs the world?” recycled (and again, on page 1), in 2009. Vakaro Žinios (Evening News) even featured a sickening photo montage of the then head of the Jewish community Dr. Shimon Alperovich, and a Soviet-era abacus, with text suggesting the Jews were conspiring to defraud the Lithuanian people. More recently, a front page was devoted to a local rabbi with a headline about Jews not having to pay taxes. The word Žydai (Jews) alone was in massive size type, as on numerous occasions, e.g. when the paper accused “The Jews” of plotting to steal the building housing the Culture Ministry. It is almost all out of a dark satire.
Posted in Antisemitism & Bias, Efraim Zuroff, Media Watch, News & Views, Obituaries, Politics of Memory, Shimon Alperovich (1928 – 2014)
Tagged Efraim Zuroff, Respublika, Simon Alperovich (Simonas Alperavicius), Simon Wiesenthal Center Israel Office, Vakaro zinios, Vytis Tomkus
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Out On Ellis Street in San Francisco
O P I N I O N
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.)
Posted in "Jewish" Events as Cover?, Books, Events, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, United States
Tagged 1835 Ellis Street, Allan Nadler, Cassedy, Efraim Zuroff, Ellen Cassedy, Ellis Street, Jewish Community Library, Litvak SIG, Olga Zabludoff, San Francisco, We are Here. Memories of the Lithuanian Holocaust
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Lithuanian-Jewish Affairs: Three Events
(Reposted from today’s Jerusalem Post)
O P I N I O N
by Efraim Zuroff
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
Posted in "Jewish" Events as Cover?, Double Games, Double Genocide: The New Form of Holocaust Revisionism & Denial, Efraim Zuroff, EU, Events, Identity Theft of Litvak Heritage, In the Era of Yivo's 100th, Kaunas, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory
Tagged Double Genocide, Efraim Zuroff, Holocaust in Lithuania, Holocaust Revisionism, Juozas Ambrazevicius Brazaitis, LAF (Lithuanian Activist Front), Lithuanian Embassy in London
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Efraim Zuroff on Tablet Magazine’s Co-Sponsorship of Lithuanian Government’s Yivo Event, and a Suggestion for Yivo’s Audience
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.
Posted in "Jewish" Events as Cover?, Double Games, Double Genocide: The New Form of Holocaust Revisionism & Denial, Efraim Zuroff, Events, Foreign Ministries: Holocaust Politics Abuse?, Identity Theft of Litvak Heritage, In the Era of Yivo's 100th, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Media Watch, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, United States
Tagged Double Genocide, Efraim Zuroff, Holocaust in Lithuania, Simon Wiesenthal Center, Yivo + Holocaust, Yivo Lithuania
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Efraim Zuroff Interviewed in Belgrade, Serbia by Aleksandar Roknić
I N T E R V I E W
Efraim Zuroff is interviewed in Belgrade by Aleksandar Roknić. Translation from Danas, 28 December 2013, by Vesna Milosevic.
Efraim Zuroff: World War II History is Being Rewritten
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.
Posted in Croatia, Efraim Zuroff, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory
Tagged Efraim Zuroff, Holocaust in Eastern Europe, Holocaust in Lithuania, Serbia + Holocaust
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Film, Video, Radio
Tagged Alicija Zukauskaite, Baltic Holocaust (flms), Christian Carlsen, CNN + Lithuania, Efraim Zuroff, Films and documentaries on the Holocaust, Juergen Hobrecht, Kukliansky + Lithuania, Lina Zigelyte, Lithuania, Marc Radomsky and Danny Ben-Moshe, Monica Lowenberg, Richard Bloom, Robert Mullan (Gitel), Saulius Berzinis
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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).
Posted in Documents, Efraim Zuroff, News & Views, Opinion, Richard Maullin, United States, Vilnius Yiddish Institute, Yiddish Affairs
Tagged Darius Udrys, Efraim Zuroff, Grant Gochin, Holocaust in Lithuania, Richard Maullin, Simon Wiesenthal Center, Steven Spielberg + Hoocaust in Lithuania, Vilnius Yiddish Institute
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Professor Pinchos Fridberg on the Higher Arithmetic of the Lithuanian Holocaust
Камушек на «могилу» бабушки, дедушки, родных со стороны матери
Понар (Paneriai), 23 сентября 2013 года, 11 : 35
Высшая арифметика истории Холокоста в Литве
Пинхос Фридберг
Posted in In Russian, Lithuania, Pinchos Fridberg
Tagged Arturas Račas, Defending History, Efraim Zuroff, Holocaust in Lithuania, Jonas Okmanas, Juozas Ambrazevicius Brazaitis, Leonidas Donskis, Lithuanian collaborators in the Holocaust, Pinchos Fridberg, Vilma Juozevičiūtė
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Efraim Zuroff Critiques Vilnius Genocide Center’s Latest Attempt to Massage Figures (and Ethics) of Local Holocaust Perpetrators
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.”
Posted in Double Genocide: The New Form of Holocaust Revisionism & Denial, Efraim Zuroff, History, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Media Watch, News & Views, Politics of Memory, Vilnius's Genocide Center and the Genocide Museum it Manages
Tagged Efraim Zuroff, Genocide Research Center in Vilnius, Holocaust in Lithuania
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Dr. Efraim Zuroff’s Speech at the Annual Memorial for Lithuanian Holocaust Victims
O P I N I O N
by Efraim Zuroff
Authorized English translation of Dr. Zuroff’s speech at the annual commemoration event held by the Association of Lithuanian Jews in Israel, received from the Israel Office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Hebrew original is here.
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.
Posted in Commemorations for Destroyed Communities, Double Genocide: The New Form of Holocaust Revisionism & Denial, Efraim Zuroff, Events, Israel, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory
Tagged Alfredas Rukšėnas, Association of Lithuanian Jews in Israel, Efraim Zuroff, Emanuel Zingeris, Genocide Center Vilnius, Holocaust in Lithuania, Joseph Melamed, Milan Chersonski, Pinchos Fridberg, Rachel Kostanian
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Why Christine Beresniova is Out of Order
O P I N I O N
by Geoff Vasil
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.
Posted in "Red-Brown Commission", Double Games, Geoff Vasil, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, US State Dept Manipulated?
Tagged Anne E. Derse, Christine Beresniova, Efraim Zuroff, Geoff Vasil (Vasiliauskas), Holocaust Education, Holocaust Obfuscation
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Estonia’s Severe Case of Holocaust Amnesia
O P I N I O N
by Efraim Zuroff
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.
Posted in Double Genocide: The New Form of Holocaust Revisionism & Denial, Efraim Zuroff, Estonia, Israel, News & Views, Opinion
Tagged Andrus Ansip, Efraim Zuroff, Holocaust and Israel, Holocaust in Estonia, Holocaust in the Baltics, Jaanika Kressa
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Landsbergis’s New Book Tries (Yet Again) to Sanitize the 1941 Hitlerist “Provisional Government” of Lithuania
B O O K S
by Geoff Vasil
Vytautas Landsbergis, Rezistencijos pradžia [“The Beginning of the Resistance: June 1941: Documents on the Six-Week Provisional Government of Lithuania”], Vilnius 2012.
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.
Posted in Books, Collaborators Glorified, Geoff Vasil, History, Lithuania, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory
Tagged Efraim Zuroff, Geoff Vasil, Holocaust in Lithuania, Lithuanian Activist Front (LAF), Lithuanian Provisional Government (1941), SLS (Summer Literary Seminars), Theory of CIA prisons in Lithuania, Vytautas Landsberrgis
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The Disquieting 2010-2012 Record of the American Embassy in Vilnius, Lithuania
- 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
Posted in "Red-Brown Commission", Double Games, Foreign Ministries: Holocaust Politics Abuse?, Human Rights, LGBTQ Equal Rights, News & Views, Politics of Memory, The Great SLS About-Face, United States, US State Dept Manipulated?
Tagged Ambassador Anne Derse, Efraim Zuroff, Geoff Vasil, Holocaust in Lithuania, Jonathan M. Berger, Lithuania, Marc Tracy, Markas Zingeris, United States embassy in Vilnius
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Simon Wiesenthal Center Laments Yivo’s Betrayals of Jewish Causes for the Sake of Lithuanian State PR
O P I N I O N
by Efraim Zuroff
reprinted with the author’s permission from today’s Times of Israel
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.
Posted in "Jewish" Events as Cover?, Collaborators Glorified, Double Games, Efraim Zuroff, Events, Human Rights, Identity Theft of Litvak Heritage, In the Era of Yivo's 100th, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Opinion, The Great SLS About-Face, United States, US State Dept Manipulated?, Yiddish Affairs
Tagged Dr. Jonathan Brent, Efraim Zuroff, Holocaust in Lithuania, International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Regimes, Markas Zingeris, Yivo, Yivo and Lithuania
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Efraim Zuroff Comments on Facebook on Next Tuesday’s Zingeris Event at Yivo in New York City
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.
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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!!!
Posted in "Jewish" Events as Cover?, Double Genocide: The New Form of Holocaust Revisionism & Denial, Efraim Zuroff, Events, Free Speech & Democracy, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory
Tagged Anne Derse, Center for Jewish History, Efraim Zuroff, Markas Zingeris, Yivo, Yivo Lithuania
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Efraim Zuroff Responds to Tablet Magazine Essay on Timothy Snyder
O P I N I O N
by Efraim Zuroff
- The following comment first appeared in the discussion following David Mikics’s Tablet magazine article on Timothy Snyder (“The Diplomat of Shoah History. Does Yale historian Timothy Snyder absolve Eastern Europe of special complicity in the Holocaust?”). It is reproduced here with Dr. Zuroff’s permission. For further background, see the links below.
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:
Posted in Books, Efraim Zuroff, History, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory
Tagged Bloodlands, Bloodlands + Lithuania, David Mikics + Tablet, Efraim Zuroff, Timothy Snyder
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An Open Letter to Yale History Professor Timothy Snyder
O P I N I O N
by Dovid Katz
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.
Posted in "Jewish" Events as Cover?, A 21st Century Campaign Against Lithuanian Holocaust Survivors?, Books, Collaborators Glorified, Double Genocide: The New Form of Holocaust Revisionism & Denial, Dovid Katz, Foreign Ministries: Holocaust Politics Abuse?, In the Era of Yivo's 100th, Lithuania, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, United States
Tagged Bloodlands, Efraim Zuroff, Jewish + Lithuania, Jonathan Brent, Mark Baker, Matt Seaton, Prague Declaration, Timothy Snyder, Yivo, Yivo Lithuania
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