OPINION | ANTISEMITISM | LITHUANIA

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OPINION

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Today’s announcement that Lithuanian prime minister Gintautas Paluckas has set up a Working Group to study the rise in antisemitism is welcomed by all people of good faith. He has assembled a group of highly accomplished public figures, led by the PM’s advisor Alexander Radchenko, who will report to the PM by 1 June 2025 on a “plan of action for combating antisemitism, xenophobia, and other forms of incitement to discord; and, on the encouragement of Jewish life”. Among the Working Group’s members are deputy minister of internal affairs Gintaras Aliksandravičius; director of the Department of National Minorities Dainius Babilas; Head of the Culture Department of the Utena District Municipality Jūratė Brasiūnienė; member of the Vilnius City Council Vygintas Gasparavičius; chairperson of the Lithuanian Jewish Community Faina Kukliansky; head of the Cabinet of the Minister of Foreign Affairs Martynas Lukoševičius; deputy minister of Education, Science and Sports Jonas Petkevičius. Congratulations and godspeed to them and their colleagues.

The proximate event — inclusion of an openly antisemitic led party in the national governing coalition — that led to the Working Group’s formation needs no repetitive recital here. For over a decade and a half, Defending History prides itself on covering the ground that others may overlook (rather than repeat what is being done out there). Nevertheless, one generic comment is perhaps apropos: To be a working group, not a PR diversion, the new entity will frankly need to comment on its own convenor’s, the prime minister’s, decision to lead a coalition government that includes an antisemitic party, the first time this has happened in any Baltic country’s post-soviet history. Or is the working group precluded from commenting on a rise in antisemitism precipitated by the prime minister’s indefensible decision that has legitimized bigtime what had been marginal claptrap? That would render it akin to the proverbial case of beating the dickens out of a person, causing huge bodily and mental harm, and then offering for the cyberworld of the  contemporary press release, a little band-aid in a pristine plastic packet.

In the usual constructive spirit of providing timely input in the public space, the Defending History community offers its proverbial two cents in the form of — three points.

First, we would respectfully urge the Working Group to avoid the pitfalls of circularity, self-dealing and omission of key people and points. While the appointment of the official chair of the state-restitution-supported “Lithuanian Jewish Community” is a most appropriate choice, it is a grave error for her to be the only Jewish representative on the body. In office following a stolen election scenario nearly eight years ago, and supported by almost none of the few thousand living Jewish citizens of Lithuania (outside a tiny largesse-receiving circle), she cannot on her own represent bona fide Jewish feelings and views. For that, the Working Group urgently needs also to appoint a representative from the poor and unsupported Vilnius Jewish Community which honestly represents the vast majority of living Jews in Lithuania; from the genuine Šiauliai Jewish Community which brings together the remaining Jewish population from the north; and the actual Klaipėda community from the country’s west (their legitimacy has not once been challenged by the power-intoxicated ersatz restitution-funded entity). Moreover, it is imperative to include the functioning rabbis who are resident in Lithuania, not so much for their own views (however important these are to hear) but as rapporteurs for the everyday Jewish citizens they are in daily or weekly contact with, and their families’ concerns. What body on antisemitism would not want to hear what they have to report? Incidentally, the quadrennial once-democratic elections for leadership of the official Lithuanian Jewish Community are due this spring. What greater gesture of support can the Working Group provide than to ensure that these elections are this year democratic, fair and free, prior to issuing their final report on the first of June? And perhaps to go further, an investigate one of the most exotic forms of antisemitism in Eastern Europe: when states dish out generous tens of millions in “restitution” that ends up under the control of one state-approved person and goes-hand-in-hand with the overnight dismantling of a decades-old community democracy, thereby crippling the remnant community that is meant to be supported by the undertaking.

Second, we call on the Working Group to examine, with an open heart and an open mind, the unwitting and little-understood role of government itself in continuing to lavishly sponsor the Genocide Center, its museum, and other far-right ultranationalist history-revisionist entities that have specialized in bringing the wonderful democratic EU and NATO member state Lithuania into disrepute by ongoing glorification of an array of collaborators and participants in the Lithuanian Holocaust. This does not mean we are calling on the Working Group to take any side in the history wars unfolding across Eastern Europe. It does mean that the Working Group needs to look at the empirical effects on fuelling antisemitism when glorification of Hitler collaborators is financed by the state itself. What conclusions does that inspire about the value of the murdered people, if those who collaborated in their genocide are some kind of national heroes in the twenty-first century? The Working Group can call on the government to do the hard working taxpayers of Lithuania a huge favor and stop financing this damaging nonsense. As we put it in the Irish Times all those years ago, when congratulating Dalia Grybauskaitė on her first election as president back in 2009.

In the final analysis, antisemitism is part of the larger issue of prejudice against people, particularly minorities, on the basis of racial or national origin, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, and so forth. It can only be fought on the basis of the supremely simply notion that all people are of equal value and must be treated equally and with the same human dignity and respect by the modern democratic state. Just as such as a state would not invest in institutions and entities glorifying those who massacred say Belarusians, Lithuanians, Poles, Roma, Russians, so it should stop investing a veritable fortune for the “Genocide Center” and various other bodies who continue to promote the glorification of Hitler’s local partners. To see where this has led within the last month alone, it is enough to cast a glance at the new campaign of defamation against the Jewish community’s late beloved Holocaust survivor Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky (Brancovskaja), the latest link in a decades-old chain of “sophisticated antisemitism”.

Third, the paramount principle of equality pertains also to how the state treats cemeteries of its minorities, a principle recognized by the American Congress and the European Parliament alike. How we treat our dead says so much about who we are as the (for the time being) living on this earth.

Jewish leaders from around the world have recently protested, with both respect and passion the “new” incarnation of the shameful tired old plan to tart up the hated Soviet “Sports Palace” ruin, that was built in the middle of the five hundred year old Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery as an openly vile Soviet humiliation of Lithuania’s grand Jewish heritage. Thousands upon thousands of generations of Litvaks still lie buried, as demonstrated conclusively by grand radar showing the unending rows of graves facing Jerusalem. The cemetery needs to be lovingly restored (images of thousands of Hebrew, Aramaic and Yiddish inscriptions exist). The Soviet monstrosity needs to be torn down in the same spirit in which all the other Soviet monstrosities in town are torn down (yes, it is antisemitism to make “one exception” when it is in the Jewish cemetery; Verily, would such an exception not be be made if it were great Lithuanian or Christian scholars of the last five hundred years buried there?). Lithuanian citizens of diverse background have written eloquently on the subject in Lithuanian.

The nexus with antisemitism was so painfully demonstrated last summer by a far-right demonstration that included hundreds shouting nationalist slogans right on top of extant Jewish graves (video). Indeed, the one Vilnius Jew who had the courage to turn up to disagree with the raging crowd has surely earned his place on the new Working Group! That an allegedly corrupt “Lithuanian Jewish Community” works with allegedly corrupt American Jewish Committee (ASJ) and Conference of European Rabbis (CER) personnel to provide bogus “permissions” for this unspeakable desecration does not make it the least bit kosher. Least of all when secret funds of the “Goodwill Foundation” that allegedly fuel the present conniving to erect a “memorial center” that would “happen to have” room for thousands to come and enjoy shows, surrounded by thousands of graves on all four sides, of Jewish citizens of Vilna who have no descendants in town to defend their graves — because those descendants were all murdered in the Holocaust. By standing up against various unseemly entities funded by the government, the Working Group can do something even greater than saving the Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery at Piramónt (in Šnipiškės/Shnípishok), and Lithuania writ large, from the impending humiliation. It can begin to build local and national empathy for one of the peoples of Lithuania that was subjected to near total genocide, empathy that cannot come about by picking one or two funded pseudo-representatives of the people concerned for yet another blue-ribbon working group or commission.

There is a grand opportunity for this new Working Group to be different from all that preceded it. An opportunity to be grabbed with open hands.

Circularity Check-up:

1. Is the legitimization of antisemitism engendered by the prime minister’s decision to include an openly antisemitic party in his governing coalition being looked at by a working group not of the prime minister’s own office?

2. Is the “Jewish representation” on the government’s Working Group limited to the de facto recipient of purported sole control over tens of millions of euros from the same government’s restitution (that itself resulted in destruction of Jewish community internal democracy)?

3. Does the Working Group include even one representative from the Vilnius Jewish Community that represents the vast majority of the few thousand Jews still living in Lithuania who are ipso facto the folks affected by antisemitism (even if it has received zero from the restitution provided by the government that has just appointed this Working Group)?

4. Does the Working Group include a single critic of the government-sponsored “Genocide Center” that is an alleged major driver of local antisemitism?

5. Does the Working Group include a single critic of another government-sponsored Working Group, the one which allegedly, via restitution funds allocated via the “Good Will Foundation” (sic.) has been using state funds to cajole “rabbinic permissions” for permanent desecration of Vilnius’s five-hundred year old Jewish cemetery via a “memorial center” that will be in face be an events center where thousands will enjoy events surrounded by thousands of extant graves around about? Would such a project be underway if it were thousands of Lithuanian/Christian scholars buried there over five hundred years? Does equality in treatment of the nation’s historic peoples mean anything?