[2 May 2025 update at end of post]

OPINION | DOCUMENTS | LITHUANIAN JEWISH COMMUNITY AFFAIRS | A STOLEN ELECTION | CHABAD IN VILNIUS | HUMAN RIGHTS

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OPINION

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VILNIUS—Even people who “thought they had seen everything” were taken aback a week ago, when without prior warning Vilnius’s only functioning synagogue was closed down on the occasion of the first seyder night of Passover, one of the most sacred Jewish calendar days of the year. The “explanation” did come shortly thereafter in the form of an official 13 April 2025 statement on the official website of the restitution fueled “Jewish (Litvak) Community of Lithuania” (the “LJC” as is it is still known from the long time title “Lithuanian Jewish Community”, LZB in Lithuanian). That is the “community” that disenfranchised virtually all the remaining few thousand Jewish people in Lithuania, by changing the system of voting (in the middle of an election campaign season!) from choice by community members to that of “associations” mostly benefiting from restitution funds. This transpired during the allegedly rigged 2017 community elections. See also the contemporary JTA reports (here and here). The official community has received tens of millions of dollars from the government in restitution.

After causing shock near and far, last week’s statement, duly preserved by the Internet Archive (and avilable as PDF), is signed by “Administration of the Vilnius Jewish Religious Community” whose nobly religious leaders will no doubt hasten to announce themselves publicly, as would any honorable authors of such public degredations of Jewish personalities in twenty-furst century Jewish Vilnius. Surely the nobly pious and God-fearing administrators of the Vilnius Jewish Religious Community would not act in the spirit of hitmen for hire.

When will this year’s mandated elections for the Lithuanian Jewish Community chairpersonship be announced on their website, along with gracious invitations to community members to announce their candidacy in a spirit of community freedom, openness, and democracy?

The “Passover grenade” comes in the sad tradition of years of a campaign of personal destruction against Chabad Lubavitch’s Rabbi Sholom-Ber Krinsky, the only full-time resident rabbi in Vilnius for the past thirty-plus years (chronicles of the 2016-2017 chapter, preceded by some establishment antisemitic publications that the official community sadly seems to echo). Rabbi Krinsky’s opponents in town (and he has his share) have been just as shocked by the defamation as his supporters. There are, after all, conventions of civility and dignity that an official minority community in an EU country is expected to uphold, the more so when its activities are underwritten to the tune of tens of millions of dollars, disbursed since inception of restitution by the “Good Will Foundation” (sic.), determined by the chairperson of the community and her co-chair, a major figure in the American Jewish Committee, in permanent, nonrotating positions of power.

While many or most members of the international boards of the “Good Will Foundation” have privately expressed horror at the goings-on, their members continue to enjoy (at least) annual wined-and-dined photo-opped junkets to Vilnius, in an alleged moral quid pro quo for public silence about the gross abuse of the funds their (and their organizations’) lamentable silence serves to legitimize. All the while, the democratically run Vilnius Jewish Community, representing the vast majority of Vilnius’s living Jewish citizens, has not, according to reports, received a single penny despite repeated “assurances” obtained by the hapless board members.

The “Passover grenade” marks a new level of “destruction from within” in the annals of post-Soviet Jewish Eastern Europe: closure of the synagogue without notice just as a major holiday is getting underway, and a new statement of defamation that tries to deprive the city’s only resident rabbi of his title, calling him “Mr. Krinsky” throughout. All coming from the state restitution fueled “official community”. Perhaps the state will look again at how its generosity is being used (or abused).

Others believe it to be “no better or worse” than past regrettable “official statements”, the most notorious of which, in the wake of the allegedly rigged election of 2017, called the Jews of Lithuania who opposed the dismantling of community democracy “mainly Russian speakers calling themselves Jews, with only a minority of people with Litvak blood” (coverage by DH, JTA; responses by Ruta Bloshtein, Pinchos Fridberg, Leonas Kaplanas).

Speaking of community elections, the official Lithuanian Jewish community chairperson’s third consecutive four-year term comes to its end this year. The announcement of a free, fair and open election campaign on the official community website, with a genuine invitation to candidates to join in a spirit of dialogue and debate, of freedom and democracy, is now the order of the day. Hopefully, it will appear very soon in the English, Lithuanian and Russian sections of www.lzb.lt.

UPDATE OF 2 MAY 2025:

Rabbi Sholom Ber Krinsky’s statement distributed via email