OPINION | MUSEUMS | VILNIUS | LITVAK AFFAIRS

◊

OPINION

◊

VILNIUS—For several decades, the Defending History community has been providing commentary on Jewish and history related museums in Lithuania and the wider region, primarily in our Museums section, initiated nearly eighteen years ago. Here in Vilnius, we have endeavored to give voice to sectors of modern Jewish (and sometimes non-Jewish) life whose views have had no other channel, especially since the closure, over a decade and a half ago, of the Jewish community’s long-beloved quadrilingual Jewish newspaper, Jerusalem of Lithuania, that was home to open and vigorous debate for decades, under the inspired editorship of the late Milan Chersonski. Ultimately, it was replaced by a PR type website dedicated to one view only, that of the tiny clique in control of the tens of millions of euros in restitution funding that has excluded the interests of today’s Jewish community, and its healthy diversity of views.

The State Jewish museum, whose official current name is the Vilna Gaon Museum of Jewish History, was founded by parliamentarian Emanuelis Zingeris and the brand new democratic Lithuanian government in 1989, some two years before total de facto achievement of national independence. It has six major venues. Our many years of commentary have included praise of a dramatic exhibit honoring Jewish resistance to the Nazis down to listing every name of every Jewish veteran from Lithuania, whether of army or partisan forces (that exhibit has since disappeared into thin air). There has been disappointment one year in a decision to put the marking of Holocaust Remembrance Day into the hands of far-right ultranationalist Holocaust-revisionist leadership of the state’s Genocide Museum. By contrast, we have expressed much admiration at the initial incarnation of the new “Museum of Culture and Identity of Lithuanian Jews” several years ago.

❊

It is now time to congratulate Mr. Sergey Kanovich (Sergejus Kanovičius) on his appointment as director of the state Jewish museum, just as we did upon the public launch of the Museum of the Lost Shtetl back in 2017. Now, as then, we wish him “wisdom, courage and rapid success.”

The major moral and intellectual challenges facing the state Jewish museum are widely spoken about. They include:

• Assurance that the entirety of the contents of The Green House at Pamankalnio 12 (officially called “the Holocaust exposition” or “the Holocaust exhibition”) will be permanently preserved as is, not “fixed or modernized” (whether there or in separate rooms at a future address). It is the only Holocaust exhibit in all of Lithuania that is totally honest about the Holocaust, including the first outbreaks of murder in June 1941 before German arrivals, and, indeed, about the heroism of the Jewish partisan resistance. It is perhaps the only museum in Europe created entirely by the irreplaceable hands of Holocaust survivors themselves, including Yiddish equally alongside Lithuanian and English. There is even a remarkable room about the multifaceted prewar Jewish culture of Vilna and Lithuania as seen through the eyes of the last generation born and raised before the Holocaust. No amount of high tech, interactives and gizmos can replace it. Defending History has chronicled many of its struggles to resist ruination “at the hands of higher authorities” and of the heroic leadership of now retired veteran director Rachel Kostanian. (When several museum employees sadly began boasting a few years back that it would all be thrown out and state-of-the-art exhibits would soon replace them in the future Holocaust museum, a few diverse parties quickly commissioned extensive photography of the entire place.)

• Rectifying the Holocaust obfuscationist texts that exist in other major addresses of the state museum (examples here and here). The attempts to make kosher the LAF (Lithuanian Activist Front) butchering of helpless Jewish civilian neighbors in the days from 23 June 1941 onward, in some forty locations before the arrival of German forces, have been an unsightly scab on this state museum. The new director has a splendid opportunity to rapidly replace such unbecoming Holocaust Obfuscation with the simple truth already told in the same institution’s Green House, and in the works of numerous witnesses, survivors, and historians. Gone forever are the days of supposedly “telling one truth in the unnoticed little wooden house up the driveway and another in big, expensive, state-of-the-art buildings, and nobody will notice.”

• Recovering and restoring to place of honor the “disappeared” exhibit honoring the Jewish veterans of the struggle against Nazism and the Holocaust. For many years, Lithuanian Jews and visitors alike were deeply moved to be able to find among the thousands of names their own parents, grandparents, great-grandparents who are heroes of the free world for having fought against Hitler.

• Restoration of the proud symbolic role of Yiddish in Vilna Yiddish culture, removed during the previous director’s tenure very recently (see also the comment piece by Dalia Epstein / Dalija Epšteinaitė).

• Both by virtue of its reach outside Vilnius (including at Ponár/Paneriai and Drúskenik/Druskininkai) and above all its overarching moral imperative, it is the museum’s responsibility to take rapid and bold action to preserve for posterity the remnants of the Jewish partisan fort in the forest that now abuts the new training grounds of Germany’s 45th Panzer Brigade (Panzerbrigade 45, Litauenbrigade). See Defending History’s section on the fort remnants, so cherished by the recently vanished generation of Holocaust survivors and veterans of the anti-Nazi partisans. The museum must work with the German brigade to cherish and preserve the fort, and for it to serve as education for the thousands of German soldiers “returning” here over eighty years later. It must not become a tool of the far-right Holocaust revisionists who publicly call for the fort’s disappearance, and are urging the new German forces to cover for that with diversionary “Jewish PR things” like cleaning old cemeteries (a fine endeavor, of course), that have nothing to do with the Holocaust and are not at the site of the new German training ground.

❊

By rapidly showing bona fide leadership, Mr. Kanovich can set in motion a long and proud tenure.

Alas, his first days in office have been marred by two major missteps. First, he boasted that his maiden invitation as director was to the German 45th Panzer Brigade, without mentioning the need to preserve the Jewish partisan fort situated next door to the Brigade, thereby continuing the diversionary “clean the old cemetery PR” to divert attention from the need to preserve Eastern Europe’s last surviving Jewish resistance forest relic. In the very days when the Jewish and European worlds were respectfully commemorating the April 19th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

Secondly, utterly inexplicably, and in a major breach of elementary decorum and ethics, he has summarily dismissed all the members of the museum’s board, including persons who have selflessly dedicated decades to the preservation of Jewish culture and heritage in Lithuania. Not the way to go, but easily all reparable at this early stage. With a touch of grace and humility.