17 April 2012. Gatestone Institute: ‘U.S. sends anti-Israel advisor to antisemitic Sweden’ by Soeren Kern. [third and fourth paragraphs from the end deal with Baltic Holocaust issues and the US's Envoy for Combating Antisemitism]

15 April 2012. DefendingHistory.com: ‘Lithuanian Foreign Ministry manipulated Chicago Litvaks’.

13 April 2012. VilNews.com: ‘First-time event in Chicago this Sunday, April 15, to address lingering issues affecting Lithuanian-Jewish relations’ [+ comments]. As HTM here.

24 March 2012. DefendingHistory.com: ‘Lithuania’s embassy in Washington recruiting “useful academics” for discredited “red-brown” commission’.

10 March 2012. DefendingHistory.com: ‘Once again, moral abdication at the American Embassy in Vilnius?’

5 February 2012. Washington DC author Olga Zabludoff launches petition to the Lithuanian ambassador to the US asking his government to ban the March 11th neo-Nazi march from the streets of Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital.

Jump to: 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013

2011

12 December 2011. The Jewish Reporter: ‘Hanukkah party at Lithuanian embassy’ [cosponsored by Harley Felstein's "Jewish Lithuanian Heritage Project" and attended by a high official of the US Holocaust Museum in Washington DC].

25 November 2011. Algemeiner Journal: ‘Hannah Rosenthal does it again’ by Dovid Katz.

May 2011. Unconfirmed report. An official of SLS (Summer Literary Seminars) Lithuania reports to DefendingHistory.com that the US embassy in Vilnius, apparently under pressure from somewhere, indicates it will provide a financial grant to the 2011 summer session on condition that Dr. Efraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Israel office, is dropped from the program.

1 April 2011. ‘Ambassador’s opening remarks at VPU’s conference on Nazi and Soviet history teaching’ on the Embassy of the United States, Vilnius, Lithuania website.

Jump to: 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013

2010

21 December 2010. ‘Why is the US silent on “double genocide”? While European countries have condemned the new Holocaust revisionism in the Baltics, America shows no moral leadership’ in the Guardian (by Dovid Katz).

3 December 2010. ‘Conference call. The Lithuanian sponsors of a Holocaust education program have a dark history of their own’ in Tablet Magazine (by Dovid Katz). Extract on History News Network.

29 November 2010. ‘US must take a tougher line on Baltic revisionism’ in the Guardian (by Efraim Zuroff).

21 November 2010. The Association of Lithuanian Jews in Israel releases to the media its 16 Sept 2010 letter to the US embassy in Lithuania.

16 November 2010. BNS reports that Lithuania’s foreign minister reports that Hillary Clinton thanked him for restitution bill progress. [Details on restitution bill here].

November 2010. [Discussion in response to Barry Rubin's article] in Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs (by Jan Grabowski, Juliana Geran Pilon, Dovid Katz, John S. Micgiel).

27-28 September 2010. The Lithuanian Foreign Minister visited City College (27 Sept) and Yivo (28 Sept), announcing at both venues that the Lithuanian parliament had decided to dedicate 2011 to remembrance of Holocaust victims. Hours after his departure, the same parliament issued a new decree dedicating 2011 to the country’s ‘great losses’ except the Holocaust, leading to a spirited pubilc letter from the tiny but proud Jewish Community of Lithuania. Several weeks later, the foreign minister made apparently antisemitic accusations at a meeting of his party in the country’s parliament, again eliciting a statement from the Jewish Community.

20 September 2010. Douglas Davidson, the US State Department’s Special Envoy for Holocaust Issues, and Anne Hall, Deputy Head of Mission at the American Embassy in Vilnius, listen as Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky (left) tells about life in the Vilna Ghetto. The window in the upper right hand corner of the photo (in a yard on Strashun Street, now Zemaitijos gatve) was part of the tiny apartment where she and her family lived in overcrowded conditions (the flat had 18 officially registered Vilna Ghetto residents as well as a number of unregistered residents).

16 August 2010. ‘Human Rights — and Holocaust Obfuscation — in the Baltic States’ [unpublished letter to the editor of the New York Times, in response to Clifford J. Levy’s report] on HITB (by Dovid Katz).

15 August 2010. ‘West Palm woman battles Lithuania to give public access to Holocaust statue’ in the Palm Beach Post (by John Lantigua).

11 July 2010. ‘Distortions of Holocaust history in Lithuania today’ (by Michael Cohen, UCLA).

3 May 2010. ‘Rosenthal lays off Lithuania. Antisemitism envoy accused of obfuscating Holocaust obfuscation’ in Tablet Magazine (by Marc Tracy).

2 May 2010. ‘No tolerance for false history’ in the Jerusalem Post (by Efraim Zuroff).

28 April 2010. President Obama’s Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, Hannah S. Rosenthal, visited the Jewish Partisan Fort, guided by its one surviving veteran in Lithuania, Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky, librarian of the Vilnius Yiddish Institute. The visit was coordinated by the U.S. Embassy’s Timothy O’Connor, and included this journal’s editor, who provided translation for Ms Brantsovsky. During the excursion, Ms Rosenthal expressed the hope that the Lithuanian government would take action to preserve the site as one that is vital to Holocaust education and the honoring of Jewish resistance against Nazi tyranny.

27 April 2010. Learning from the past, looking toward the future’, lecture at Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas (by United States Special Envoy Hannah Rosenthal).

26 April 2010. ‘US antisemitism envoy welcomes Lithuania’s antisemitism efforts’ on BNS.

15 April 2010. ‘Lithuania in the international media: from CIA prisons to the extermination of Jews’ on Delfi.lt (by Mindaugas Jackevicius). English translation.

3 April 2010. ‘The threat of Baltic ultranationalism. The EU is wrong to ignore the resurgence of neofascism in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia — It threatens European democracy’ in the Guardian (by Efraim Zuroff). In Estonian. In Lithuanian.

11 March 2010. ‘ADL calls on new Ukrainian president to withdraw “Hero” title bestowed by predecessor on Nazi collaborators’ on ADL.org.

24 February 2010. ‘Q & A with Dovid Katz in the (Connecticut) Jewish Ledger’ (by Cindy Mindell). PDF.

12 February 2010. The Nation: ‘The hero of the Orange Revolution poisons Ukraine’ by Mark Ames.

26 January 2010. ‘Dropping International Holocaust Memorial Day would be world’s final insult to survivors; would spur new wave of antisemitism’ on www.Wiesenthal.com (by Abraham Cooper).

“And how exactly, for example, would such ‘joint commemorations’ unfold in Lithuania? A moment of silence for Jewish citizens butchered by the Nazis and their local collaborators, followed by a moment of silence for these victimizers, later turned into ‘victims of Communism?’ I urge Lithuania and other supporters of this drive to drop their campaign and instead preserve the memory of the Shoah and the unique suffering of its victims that is commemorated on Holocaust Memorial Day.

“The fallout from the failure to deal honestly with the past has already manifested. Most emerging post-Soviet era democracies have refused to try their Nazi War criminals. Worse still, in the case of Lithuania, authorities have sought to prosecute heroic Jewish former Soviet partisans, including Dr. Yitzhak Arad, the revered former Chairman of Yad Vashem. Such outrageous moves embolden those who identify Jews with Communism, by equating Communism with Nazism, they are saying; in effect that everyone is guilty of genocide.

“I was in the audience at the annual Global Forum Against Anti-Semitism in Jerusalem last month, when the Lithuanian Foreign Minister Vygaudas Usacksas did say that the condemnation of Stalinism ‘should never be applied to diminish the moral and political lessons of the Holocaust,’ but frankly that is indeed the game plan. And I fear that if Lithuania doesn’t soon halt his government’s active support to relativize the Nazi Holocaust and degrade its uniqueness, the next Global Forum will have to deal with the inevitable anti-Semitic fallout, intended or otherwise — from this outrageous campaign.”

Rabbi Abraham Cooper (Associate Dean, Simon Wiesenthal Center)

Jump to: 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013

2009

30 December 2009. ‘Don’t let the Holocaust be written out of history’ in the (Washington) Jewish Week (by Dovid Katz).

3 December 2009 United States congressmen Shelley Berkley, Howard Berman (chairman, House Foreign Affairs Committee), Paul Hodes, James Moran, and Robert Wexler (chairman, House Subcommittee on Europe) protest the Lithuanian government’s defamation and persecution of Holocaust Survivors Dr Rachel Margolis and Ms Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky

22 August 2009. Vilnius reception in honor of Professor Sara Ginaite of Toronto, veteran of the anti-Nazi resistance, who defied prosecutors’ threats to visit her native Lithuania. In a show of support, the United States Embassy’s political officer Tim O’Connor joined the group honoring Prof. Ginaite, as did the Lithuanian foreign ministry’s Jolanda Kriskovieciene. Photo from left: Tim O’Connor, Faina Kukliansky, Sara Ginaite, Dovid Katz, Jolanda Kriskovieciene.

3 July 2009. Elements of the ‘Prague Declaration’ (ambiguous ‘double genocide language’) inserted into the OSCE’s ‘Vilnius Declaration’ of 3 July 2009 [see p. 48, points 3 and 10]. [Unfortunately, the United States voted for the resolution. It has in fact separate 'nice' language on the Holocaust, which can however not obviate the document's legitimization of the Holocaust Obfuscation movement and its underlying belief in Double Genocide.]

30 July 2009. Abraham H. Foxman, national director of ADL in the United States, sends a letter of support to Professor Dovid Katz.

18 June 2009. ‘Lithuania: Tme to save Jewish partisan fortin Rudininkai’ on Samuel Gruber’s Jewish Art and Monuments (by Samuel D. Gruber).

“As an historian, preservationist and a Jew I think is essential that these remains be protected and preserved. It is not a preposterous goal. Already large sums are being allocated for the preservation of sites of the ‘Forest Brothers’ (many of whom were ex-fascist collaborators and ‘Jew-shooters’ who fled into the forests in 1944 to escape the Soviet advance). This fact should encourage the preservation of this site, too, but in fact the possibility of preserving this site, and teaching its history, aggravates and even enrages those in Lithuania who continue to celebrate the pro-Nazi participants and policies of the war years. Today’s government, while in no way complicit, would rather the whole thing go away. Most likely, like an insurance provider facing a malpractice suit, there are many who are just sitting back and waiting for Faina Brantsovksy to pass away, and her memories to follow.

“It would be so much better to celebrate Fania’s life, struggle, survival and accomplishments and protect and preserve the Rudininkai Forest fort in her honor, and in the memory of those who lived and fought from there. I call on the Lithuanian government, which has done so much to preserve the memory of Ghetto Jews at the memorials at Panerai (Ponary) and Kaunus’s Ninth Fort, to step forward to protect this simple site, too. I call on the international community, which has done much to assist in the conservation of Auschwitz and the building of memorials at Mauthausen, Belzec, Rumbula, and most recently the Labor Camps of Estonia, and so many other places, to step forward to assist this effort, too.

“The International Survey of Jewish Monuments is ready to act as facilitator for this project, in the right circumstances. If funds are available, ISJM will assist in putting together an international conservation and interpretation team to work with local professionals and authorities for the long-term protection and preservation of the Rudininkai Forest fort.”

Samuel D. Gruber (Jewish Art and Monuments)

16 April 2009. Letter to Dr Rachel Margolis from the National Director of ADL.

9 April 2009. Keene State College honors Dr. Rachel Margolis.

7 April 2009. Letter to Dr Rachel Margolis from the chairman, president and executive director of NCSJ.

15 March 2009. Holocaust Council of Metro West issues a Woman of Valor award to Dr Rachel Margolis.

The award was presented to Dr Margolis by Professor Israel Bartal at an event held at Tel Aviv’s Leivick House on 19 June 2009. She expressed her gratitude to the American group during her speech. Photo: Leyzer Burko.

13 March 2009. ‘Lithuania must stand up against antisemitism’ in the Jewish Standard (by Abraham Foxman).

26 January 2009. ‘Muddling the Holocaust in Lithuania’ on History News Network (by Professor Steven S. Lawson).

Jump to: 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013

2008

November 2008. ‘Analyzing Lithuanian antisemitism. The “Double Genocide” theory refuses to quit’ in Jewish Currents (by Geoff Vasil [Vasiliauskas]); alternate link.

September 2008. ‘Investigating Jewish partisans in Lithuania: the protest of a veteran Jewish partisan’ in Jewish Currents (by Professor Sara Ginaite).

“Prosecutors can easily turn into agents of injustice if they begin campaigns on ethnic or political grounds that have little to do with the work of identifying specific crimes and seeking to bring to a fair trial their alleged perpetrators. I invite the general prosecutor to put everything into its rightful context and not pursue a policy that appears to be based on ethnic targeting. The first step is to stop and ask: Why now, in 2008, schedule the pre-trial investigation of the circumstances of the event in Koniuchy, instead of examining the murder of 74,500 Lithuanian citizens during Soviet rule — and, yes, into the issue of who took part in the murder of two hundred thousand Jewish citizens of Lithuania during the Holocaust? Any request for bringing to justice the Nazi war criminals and the Soviet oppressors and killers is described as ‘too late.’ Strangely, however, it has just become not too late to use the Lithuanian justice system to discredit those who fought against the Nazis.

“How can one not be humiliated by this selective justice, which is, in practice, directed exclusively toward the few surviving Jewish partisans? Investigation of the Koniuchy case is not justice. It is a manipulation of justice, with the goal of forming a negative image of the Jewish partisans and of Holocaust survivors generally.

“A state prosecutor need not allow himself to become the instrument of some Lithuanian factions who support the idea of collective guilt and collective responsibility. But it looks as if the prosecutor has surrendered to pressure and has begun this useless investigation knowing perfectly well that he is not going to charge any concrete person with any concrete alleged crime.”

Professor Sara Ginaite

25 August 2008. Letter to Dr Rachel Margolis from nine NATO embassies in Vilnius.

21 August 2008. ‘In search of Jewish Vilna’ on JTA (by Rokhl Kafrissen).

20 August 2008. ‘Capital of culture or injustice?’ in the Jewish Week (by Mark Weitzman, director of government affairs at the Simon Wiesenthal Center USA).

19 August 2008. Open Letter from students and faculty of the summer program in Yiddish language and literature at the Vilnius Yiddish Institute at Vilnius University (text by Elliott Palevsky, director of the cultural program).

15 August 2008. ‘Rokhl Margolis, 86, cannot visit her hometown Vilna because she fought against the Nazis’ [in Yiddish] in the Algemeyner Zhurnal (by Dovid Katz). Part II.

14 August 2008. ‘From hero to harassed: Lithuania’s campaign against Holocaust survivors’ in the Cleveland Jewish News (by Budd Margolis and Marjorie Margolis).

1 August 2008. United States congressmen Howard Berman, Paul Hodes and Robert Wexler protest the actions of the Lithuanian government.

25 July 2008. ‘Will the world remain silent as a new and more cunning form of Holocaust Denial comes before — the European Parliament?’ [in Yiddish] in the Algemeyner Zhurnal (by Dovid Katz). Part II.

20 July 2008. ‘Lithuania’s new Jewish concerns’ in the Washington Times (by Dan Mariaschin, executive vice president, B’nai B’rith International).

11 July 2008. ‘Lithuania has earned its place in Europe’ in the Forward (by Andrius Bruzga, ambassador of the Republic of Lithuania).

For the first time, a Lithuanian official explained in a formal letter for publication his government’s Double Genocide policy to an American Jewish readership. The letter came after shockwaves were spreading that one country in the world, Lithuania, was attempting to prosecute Holocaust Survivors who escaped certain death to join the anti-Nazi resistance.

“We are in Europe, and we share Europe’s history and destiny — with all the complexity that may entail. As a member of the European Union, Lithuania condemns both disastrous totalitarian regimes of the 20th century, Nazism and communism. All those who committed crimes against innocent civilians must face justice: Nazi collaborators, Soviet partisans, KGB interrogators, etc. There is no other way to repair the broken social fabric and heal the wounds.

“With time, we will rebuild Lithuania and restore the well-being and dignity of our people — of all the peoples who once lived in Lithuania. Vilnius rightly deserves the title of the European Capital of Culture and is proud to have it.”

Audrius Bruzga, Ambassador of Lithuania to the US

2 July 2008. ‘Tensions mount over Lithuanian probe’ in the Forward (by Lana Gersten & Marc Perelman).Read more: http://www.forward.com/articles/13695/#ixzz13Cc2nGkJ

26 June 2008. ‘Europe’s shameful honoring of Vilnius’ in the Forward (by Andrew Baker, director of international Jewish affairs at the American Jewish Committee).

11 June 2008. ‘Persecution of former Jewish partisans in Lithuania’ on Vilna Stories (by Dr Michael Good).

30 April 2008. The Embassy of the United States in Lithuania issues a certificate of appreciation, signed by Ambassador John A. Cloud, to Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky; presented by political officer Joseph Boski at a luncheon organized by the Vilnius Yiddish Institute.