A pig’s head, adorned with a black hat and makeshift hasidic style earlocks, was placed on the pavement right outside the door, within the courtyard of the main synagogue in Kaunas, Lithuania’s second city, during Sabbath morning services. This caused profound grief to the very small congregation of survivors who pray at the city’s Choral Synagogue, the only prewar Jewish prayerhouse in town that still functions. The service was interrupted as police arrived to investigate. The Lithuanian Jewish Community described it as a neo-Nazi antisemitic attack. The police however told BNS that the incident ‘is still qualified as a disturbance of the public peace’. Moreover, the commander of the Central Police Commissariat Gintautas Dirmeikis told BNS that ‘There are no suspects so far’. Photo by Laimutis Brundza / Kauno diena. Other reports: Alfa.lt. Delfi.lt. Jerusalem Post. JTA. YNet. Some reports mention a star of David carved into the pig’s head. Video by Lietuvos rytas. Lietuvos rytas article by A. Vinokuras. On 25 August the prime minister finally reacted, expressing hope the perpetrators would be found and punished; an advisor to the PM called the attack ‘a relic from the Soviet past [!]‘. BNS report here in English; Alfa.lt, 15min.lt. Praise for the PM from Rabbi Andrew Baker. London Litvak starts drive to install CCTV for secutiry at the Kovno synagogue.
With the characteristic verve of Yiddish humor, a ‘dark Litvak joke’ has been spreading among elderly Jewish survivors in town. ‘Yet again, the police cannot find the culprits, because they are still too busy looking for Fania, Rokhl and Yitskhok’ (see here and here).
A Lithuanian court in Klaipeda approved the public display of swastikas on the grounds that they are ‘Lithuania’s historical heritage rather than symbols of Nazi Germany’. An ultranationalist ‘expert’ transported from Vilnius was easily able to persuade the court, which did not bother to ask a contrasting view of the Holocaust Survivor community, or the Jewish Community of Lithuania, in a European country with one of the highest proportions of Holocaust genocide on the continent. This sad distinction resulted from massive local participation. Image from 16 Feb Klaipeda demonstration courtesy DMN at Kaunodiena.lt.
BNS report on the court’s 19 May decision here. So much for the parliament’s 2008 ban on ‘Nazi and Soviet symbols’ which only caused pain to aged veterans of the anti-Nazi war effort, and which was ultimately part of the machinations in support of the Double Genocide movement in the European Parliament, in cooperation with the movement’s local power structures.
The same state prosecution service that works to send Holocaust Survivors to eternity as suspected war criminals (neither charging nor clearing the innocent persons defamed); and, that is pleased to provide protection and the facade of dignity for neo-Nazi marches (see below at 11 March 2008 and 11 March 2010) spared no effort to ban the 8 May 2010 Baltic Pride parade. In a typically unbelievable statement worthy of central casting, the head of the Prosecutor General’s office told BNS: ‘I appealed to the court after receipt of information about possible disturbances. The information is confidential, and I would like to refrain from further comment, however, the data we have in our possession suggests there is a possibility of certain disturbances, which we would not want’. Another classic: ’Participants of the rally could be targets of violence, we can’t have a police officer for each of them. The event would be protected in its specific location, however, nobody can forecast a crowd’s actions’, he added. Asked whether he had information about a planned riot, Petrauskas said he could not ‘state this specifically’ according to the BNS report. BNS report here.
8 May 2010 update: While in the end forced by courts to allow the Pride parade (which the capital’s police easily managed), police provided protection and status to the neo-Nazi marchers who for hours flaunted fascist flags near the Reval Lietuva Hotel, flanked by flags of the European Union, Lithuania and various other member states. Eyewitness report on Page 1 → 8 May 2010.
The English version of a clandestine plan (dated 21 Nov 2009) to thwart honorable restitution of prewar communal Jewish property to the Jewish Community of Lithuania was leaked to this website today. Incredibly, the plan was proposed by the ruling party in the country’s parliament without informing the government’s long standing negotiating partner —the Jewish Community of Lithuania. The plot is diabolically simple: to dispense with the communal restitution under negotiation for over a decade (and agreed by every other new-accession EU state), and to ensure that not a single Holocaust Survivor sees any benefit in his or her lifetime. Instead, funds would be poured into ‘morbid tourism’ projects, particularly the white elephant follyesque rebuild of the Great Synagogue (destroyed during and after World War II) as part of the ‘Disneyland Vilna-Ghetto Dead-Jew Tourist Park’ which is anathema to the country’s living Jewish community.
The most offensive part of the document is the passage claiming that the living remnant Jewish survivor community does ‘not have any direct connection with the victims and communities’. This is a diplomatic reformulation of the antisemitic canard that the Jewish community of Lithuania is not legitimate. The claim is part of the wider strategy of pretended friendship toward foreign Jews and prewar Jewry that goes hand in hand with disdain for living local Jews. Text of the document in English translation. (An article written in a similar spirit by the former director of the ‘Litvak Foundation‘ [!] claimed that two-thirds of Lithuanian Jews are ‘aliens from the East’, see below → 16 July 2009.)
The fragile but proud Jewish community of Lithuania was again shaken to its core by a Neo-Nazi march in broad daylight through sections of downtown Vilnius on Lithuania’s March 11 Independence Day (see below at March 2008). Once again, the marchers, this time numbering around 500, were diligently escorted by police. Marking the twentieth anniversary of the country’s bold breakaway from Soviet tyranny and its inspiring transition to a modern democracy — a magnificent achievement celebrated by all the country’s communities — it is a cherished day all around. Its tainting by another police-escorted Neo-Nazi parade was all the more painful, especially for aged Holocaust Survivors.
Once again, the government’s ‘red-equals-brown’ Holocaust Obfuscation movement played its part. In June of 2008, the country’s parliament had passed a law forbidding both Nazi and Soviet symbols. This struck observers as somewhat curious, given that there are no ‘pro-Soviet’ marches or efforts in the country, and the only people to be offended were very elderly veterans who cherished their victory over Hitler. The ultranationalist and neo-fascist movement, however, lost little time in proliferating an array of swasticals, a term we introduce to cover the ‘whole lot’ of swastika-inspired symbols used by ultranationalists, racists and neo-Nazis in the course of activities against ethnic, religious and sexual minorities, and against foreigners. By marching with ‘three-legged’ swastikas, with the ‘Lithuanian swastika’ and other variations, the neo-Nazis seem to have ‘outwitted’ lawmakers who seem quite content to be ‘outwitted’. Moreover, attempts to resurrect and march about with prewar swastikas as ‘art’ or as claimed ‘national symbol’ are gaining traction.
For aged Holocaust Survivors interviewed since the march, the most painful symbol was, however, not the swastika. It was rather the white armbands worn by some marchers, celebrating the infamous ‘activists’ who set the Lithuanian Holocaust in motion by murdering innocent civilian Jews in dozens of towns before the actual arrival of the Germans in the last week of June 1941. When Nazi forces arrived, ‘the white armbands’ became Hitler’s murderers par excellence. The flaunting of the armband on the streets of central Vilnius in 2010 is a grievous stain on the entire region. It is nevertheless hoped that in spite of recent setbacks on the freedom-of-speech front, major politicians, academics, intellectuals, law enforcement authorities and other elites will act rapidly — and convincingly. More photos and reports: Balsas.lt. Delfi.lt. Video by Lietuvos rytas .
The annual Uzgavenes festival, celebrated throughout Lithuania, again featured costumes and behavior making fun of – and perpetuating the worst stereotypes of – Roma and Jews (‘and monsters’). Roma and Jews comprise two of the country’s smallest and weakest minorities. Most of both communities were murdered during the Holocaust by the Nazis (with massive voluntary participation in the killings by locals). Today, progressive forces continue to live in hope that political, academic, legal, religious and cultural opinion makers in the country will rise to the occasion of explaining the essence, evil and dangers of such rampant racism unconvincingly disguised as the majority’s ‘national ethnographic tradition’. See below at 2008 (→ 6 Feb) for Michael Casper’s Forward report on that year’s event. Photo by Evaldas Butkevičius.
In 2010, Uzgavenes coincided with February 16th Independence Day celebrations. In some areas, Nazi symbols were touted. Occasionally the practice is nowadays packaged as the reclamation of the prewar swastika as a proposed symbol of the nation. In this image, residents of Klaipeda celebrate ‘classic swastika art’. Photo courtesy of DMN. Report here. English translation. [Note: The Klaipeda swastikas led to the court case which legalized the public display of swastikas; see now entry for 19 May 2010.]
On Holocaust Remembrance Day, the international section (‘World’) of the popular mass-circulation daily Vakaro zinios led off with the article ‘Jews Don’t Understand Why they are Not Loved’ by an unnamed author. The first sentence starts with a reference to ‘the Jewish community’ which is locally taken to refer to today’s Vilnius Jewish community. The article goes on to explain antisemitism as the result of the previous year’s conflict in Gaza, and contains a large photograph of a scene of devastation there. Translation into English.
Also on Holocaust Remembrance Day, state prosecutors came to the Jewish Community’s premises at Pylimo Street 4 to harass the community’s leaders for information about an additional Holocaust Survivor (85 years old, resident in Tel Aviv), whom they propose to ‘investigate’ for unspecified reasons. Story on front page, and on Blaming the Victims (→ 2010, 27 Jan).
The Shabad statue in Vilnius’s old town (wartime territory of the Vilna Ghetto) was defaced in a paint attack. Report on Delfi. The sculpture, unveiled in May 2007, commemorates Dr Tsemakh Shabad (1864-1935), a near-legendary figure in Vilna Jewish lore. Upsetting as such events are, it was rather more painful for the Jewish community when the former director of the ‘Litvak Foundation‘, who had worked tirelessly to organize the monument, came out with a highly disturbing article last summer (see below, 2009 → 16 July). Photo by Kirilas Cachovskis.
According to a front page report (continued on page 3), in the mass circulation daily Vakaro zinios, headlined: ‘Important News. Jews won’t slander us Anymore’, a shutdown of Holocaust Studies is called for to ‘shut up Jews slandering Lithuanians’. Specifically, the article, in an antisemitic tone, explains that the Genocide Center will itself now determine which locals participated in the Holocaust. English translation. For the overall tone at the Genocide Museum, on Vilnius’s central boulevard, see below (→ 5 July 2008). Antisemitism and rejection of the internationally known narrative of the Holocaust are closely interlinked in the Baltic region, and to some extent, throughout Eastern Europe.
One of the novel forms of antisemitism to emerge from the post-Soviet Baltics revels in diminishing Nazism and ‘growing’ Communism (often regarded as a ‘Jewish plot’) in a macabre equation, to produce a model of ‘equality’ for naive westerners and the European Parliament, while at home gloating at perceived successes in actually presenting Communism as ‘worse’. At the root of the project is the wish to obfuscate the Holocaust and the dismal Baltic record of collaboration, while seeking to cast aspersions on the victims and the few survivors by tacitly encouraging the canard ‘All Jews are Communists’. This graphic, a less-than-mature red-brown ‘scorecard’ (with the foregone result of the ‘game’ provided: Communism 1, Nazism 0), was offered up yet again by the mainstream news portal Delfi.lt, in the course of an attack on President Shimon Peres of Israel for having expressed his view that Nazism and Communism are not the same (English translation of the Delfi.lt article here). In any case, President Peres’s actual remarks in Lietuvos rytas (English here) were taken out of context and distorted.
Minutes after the German Embassy in Vilnius issued a press release announcing that it had awarded Germany’s Federal Cross of Merit to Holocaust survivor Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky (born 1922), Lithuania’s main news portal, Delfi.lt, published a bileful attack replete with libelous and ridiculous accusations about her ’war crimes’ (in effect trying to blame the Holocaust’s victims, a frequent ploy of the Baltic region’s Double Genocide Industry that is pushing the Prague Declaration in the European Parliament). The campaign against Holocaust survivors was launched by the antisemitic press and picked up by state prosecutors, starting in 2006 (see Blaming the Victims and the 28 Oct 2009 entry on the home page). English translation. The Lithuanian original appeared with this caricature of anti-Nazi resistance veteran Brantsovsky, librarian of the Vilnius Yiddish Institute, whose entire family perished in the Holocaust. It is not known why the Yiddish institute’s website contains no mention of the award, or of the unseemly attack against its own beloved librarian, who has been with the VYI since its inception in 2001. Speculation has centered on pressure ‘from above’ and fear of falling into disfavor with powers that be. On a related note, there is growing international interest in preservation of the underground partisan fort where Fania lived from September 1943 until the region’s liberation in July 1944. Authorities in the country seem to wish the fort to disappear. Fania is the country’s last Holocaust survivor who actually lived there. She continues to accompany visitors and students there. The international effort to save this remarkable Holocaust site is spearheaded by Samuel Gruber’s Jewish Art & Monuments site.
‘Memory being trampled. Neither our Parliament nor our diplomats want to defend Lithuania’s heroes from Jewish libel’ by Ignas Jacauskas. This multi-part feature on the front page extends to an editorial (p. 5) and to a ‘Voice of the Nation’ feature (p. 3), where Ruta the student, Laura the housekeeper, Raimonda the know-it-all, Irenijus the internet specialist and Juozas the construction worker express their views at the reporter’s behest. English translation.
‘Jewish property and a burnt-out land’ on the country’s main news portal Delfi.lt by the former director of the ‘Litvak Foundation’ (Litvaku fondas), whose accomplishments include the projects to erect statues of famed Jewish personalities Tsemakh Shabad and Romain Gary; image published with the article. Text includes the statement: ‘There are about 3000 Jews in Lithuania, and one must keep in mind that only some 1000 are really Lithuanian Jews (heirs and successors to the former Jewish communities), rather than aliens from the East.’ English translation.
Image from the front page of the daily Vakaro zinios: a photomontage of the elected 80 year old chairman of the Jewish Community of Lithuania and a Soviet-era abacus. The headline and accompanying article on p. 4 suggest that ’the Jews’ are plotting to expropriate money from the country.
Headline and image from page 2 of Vakaro zinios: a photo of the Culture Ministry building, with the caption and article suggesting that ‘the Jews’ are working to take it away from the government. The article is headed ‘Lithuanian law being corrected by the Jews’ with the word ‘Jews’ in rather large type.
A student was asked at the oral defense of his/her thesis: ‘Did the Jews pay you to do this topic?’ There was no comment from any committee member, and no written protest from the student’s supervisor or sponsoring department. Note: The student’s topic had no connection to Holocaust issues.
Part of a list of Jewish victims of the Vilna Ghetto (including fallen resistance hero Yechiel Sheinboim) appears in the Baltic Times instead of the captioned list of alleged Nazi-allied murderers (zoom-in). The young foreign reporter was wholly innocent; a still unidentified source provided the wrong list. An obscure and ambiguous correction appeared the following week. Moreover, director of the Vilnius Yiddish Institute Sarunas Liekis is quoted (misquoted?) in the article (column 2), as calling the last active group of Litvak Holocaust survivors in the world (the ALJ in Tel Aviv) ‘extreme right-wingers’, adding that ‘scholars don’t talk to them’. Although now aged, these survivors’ ranks still include prominent Holocaust scholars. The Baltic trend to delegitimize Holocaust survivors and their supporters is part of the wider series of attempted conceptual realignments deemed ‘necessary’ to propagate the Double Genocide bandwagon, and obfuscation of the Holocaust, within the context of regional unltranationalism.
After human rights advocate and journalist Andrius Navickas lodged a protest against the publication of the antisemitic and homophobic cartoon, a caricature of his face and body was inserted into the ‘Jews and Gays control the world’ cartoon and published on the front page of Vakaro zinios. It appeared along with the article ‘What is the Gay Manifesto?’ English translation.
Image from the front page of Respublika, depicting the Jew and the Gay holding up the globe, under the headline ‘Kas valdo pasauli?’ (‘Who controls the world?’), followed on p. 3 by a racist, antisemitic and homophobic article by the editor. The cartoon first appeared on page 1 of the paper in 2004.
While closing ‘part’ of its ‘investigation’ against Holocaust survivor and eminent historian Dr Yitzhak Arad, the Prosecution Service of the Republic of Lithuania issues a public call ‘to the society [public] for assistance’ searching for ‘people who can give evidence or have important information’. More incredibly, the prosecutors’ press release attacks Dr Arad’s famous memoir The Partisan, a classic of Holocaust resistance memoir literature, on the basis of an anonymous ‘Doctor of Humanitarian Sciences (expert-historian)‘. And so, the prosecution service that never achieved the slightest punishment of a single Nazi war criminal in connection with the genocide of 200,000 Lithuanian Jews, leaves for posterity its call to the public for ‘evidence’ against the anti-Nazi resistance hero Yitzhak Arad along with a gutless attack on the scholar’s book based on an anonymous trasher. Perhaps the prosecutors’ mysterious ‘Doctor of Humanitarian Sciences (Expert-Historian)’ will muster the courage to come forward and identify himself for history?
NOTE: This 25 Sept 2008 official press release has been the last word from prosecutors on the Arad affair. Rumors and claims of the case having been properly closed and an apology issued to Dr Arad (and to Yad Vashem, of which he was founding director) are sadly without basis and constitute misinformation [as of date of this entry: 22 Feb 2010]. Moreover, there has to date been not one public word on the affair from the ‘Red-Brown Commission‘, which is housed in the Prime Minister’s office, about its own former (and founding) member. Commission’s site here; it continues to list Dr Arad under ‘membership suspended’
‘All goats climb on a bent willow tree’ by member of parliament Julius Veselka in Laisvas laikrastis. English translation.
Images (on delfi.lt) of the neo-Nazi paint attack on the central Vilnius building of the Jewish Community of Lithuania on the night of 9-10 August 2008; additional image (photos by Milan Chersonski, editor of Jerusalem of Lithuania). There have been no arrests.
‘Are God’s chosen people always right?’ by Juozas Ivanauskas in Laisvas laikrastis. English translation. And, in the same issue: ‘Globalism’ by former parliament member V. Petkevicius. English translation.
‘The rabbis are causing havoc in Lithuania’ by Professor Jonas Ciulevicius in Ukininko patarejas. English translation.
Exhibition panel at the state sponsored Genocide Museum, exemplifying the nexus of Holocaust trivialization and antisemitism: ‘In Auschwitz we were given some spinach and a little bread’. Zoom-in of the text (2008 exhibit).
The permanent exhibit includes a post-Holocaust caricature of a Soviet jeep being driven by Lenin, Stalin and ‘the Jew Yankel’ (with no comment on the antisemitic portrayal). Sample of another antisemitic exhibit; & another. Such is sometimes the local face of the ‘Soviet-Nazi equivalence’ that is disseminated at the European Parliament via the Prague Declaration and other resolutions.
An article in the prestigious mainstream daily Lieutvos rytas is headlined ‘The Jews Can’t Digest [or: 'mouth'] all of their Property’. PDF.
‘Zionists’ by former member of the Lithuanian parliament Dr Ruta Gajauskaite [one part of a series]. English translation.
7 June 2008. ‘The Holocaust’ by Dr Ruta Gajauskaite. English translation.
‘Jews are not only Clever People’ by Algirdas Berkevicius in Lietuvos aidas (front page story, continued on p. 3). English translation.
