Geoff Vasil
Fresh from his attempt to turn a routine immigration check at an international point of entry into an international conspiracy against his person, former Lithuanian Chief Rabbi made good on his promise to whip up scandal against his former boss, Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky, by manipulating the Israeli media over mere plans to renovate the Palace of Sports complex in Vilnius last month.
Naive or facile reporting in Times of Israel and the Jerusalem Report relied either upon wikileaks leaked US embassy cables from years ago, or intentional misrepresentations of the scenario by the Yiddishist Dovid Katz writing on his website defendinghistory.com and apparently in personal contact with the reporters.
The Lithuanian Jewish Community responded by pointing out everything was only in the planning stages, the former cemetery in dispute was destroyed by the Soviets in 1950, there are no plans to dig anywhere on the site or build anything new, and the only issue is renovation of an existing structure and the construction of an appropriate memorial to the Jews buried there.
Dovid Katz continued to misrepresent the issue on his website, misleading by omission and attempting to foist the image onto his readers of greedy Lithuanian bureaucrats and developers standing by with bulldozers and backhoes ready to trample headstones and send bits of coffin and bone hurtling through the air.
In fact there is nothing there. Any trace of the cemetery itself is long gone. It wasn’t a working cemetery since the late 1800s, and was completely erased from the surface of the earth in 1950. It took another twenty years for the Soviet authorities to get around to constructing the cyclopean Palace of Sports there, with construction finishing in 1971. In the intervening years it was a barren field, a vacant lot. The Soviets did exhibit some sort of sensitivity, misplaced as it turns out, and removed the human remains of the Vilna Gaon to the one working Jewish cemetery in another part of Vilnius. After Lithuanian independence two separate monuments were set up at the site to remember the Shnipishok cemetery, a stone one and a metal plaque, both multilingual.
The continuing Jerusalem Report reporting has been the most obnoxious for its lack of fact-checking and errors, and lack of understanding or deliberate misunderstanding of the situation. For instance, in the latest hit-piece the author adds as an aside: “In Jewish culture, the cemetery
was known as Piramont.” This is not a Jewish name, obviously. It was known briefly as the cemetery IN Piromont, a neighborhood planned for but never really the popular name, in 1875, when Šeškinė aka Shnipishok was divided administratively into Piromont and Skansen by Tsarist city authorities. Piromont was named after Piro, the voivod of Vitebsk in Byelorussia, and Skansen is the name of an open-air museum in Stockholm. How much more Jewish can you get than that? Neither name ever really caught on among local residents, Jewish or Gentile, so how did the Jpost author come up with this? He took it on good authority from Dovid Katz, who dug the name up somewhere in an old document and decided for reasons of his own this was the REAL name of the cemetery. He can be forgiven this lack of objectivity, if only because he has focused so much on the Vilna of the late 1800s and early 1900s, not least in his excellent recent book of sort stories set in the period and translated from Yiddish to English under the title “The City in the Moonlight: Stories of the Old-Time Lithuanian Jews” (translated by Barnett Zumoff, Jersey City, 2012). Of course if anyone wanted to check the veracity of the claim, it might be enough to note the cemetery itself was shut down and stopped accepting new interments in 1831, while the administrative division of the Shnipishok neighborhood only happened in 1875.
Neither does Dovid Katz understand the place the Palace of Sports holds in the architectural ensemble of 20th century Vilnius. He cannot be expected to understand. As an academic he already lives in a sort of ivory tower, but now as a former academic turned activist he has even less time for such diversions. He himself and the Israeli press represent him as a Vilnius resident, which isn’t exactly true either: he spends at least half his time at his home in North Wales, and when he is in Vilnius he tends to flit from meeting to meeting by taxi, without a lot of interaction with locals. C’est l’vie academique.
The Palace of Sports was a major part of Vilnius for many years. Most likely Katz and Burstein have never attended any events there. In the Soviet Union mass public events were meant to a certain extent to replace the communal nature, fellowship and pneumatism of religious houses of worship. The Palace of Sports bulks large on the spiritual as well as architectural horizon of the people of Vilnius, in a certain sense. Now it appears it is illegal to tear it down to build something else there, because it is an architectural heritage site. That means the people of the capital city have two options: let it fall into ruin, or repair it. In a sense this is a spiritual mission as well as a physical one to preserve the integrity of the area.
Katz was instrumental in Chaim Burstein’s earlier attempt to pretend he was being hunted down by the Lithuanian authorities on order of the head of the Lithuanian Jewish Community, Faina Kukliansky, because of his opposition to renovation of the Palace of Sports building. The same reporter at Jerusalem Post misconstrued that event for readers and then went on to author a whole series of misleading reports about the cemetery. After continuing to threaten, blackmail and harass his boss, his employer, over the course of a year, Burstein finally had his contract come up, and it was not renewed. Why wasn’t he sacked earlier? Because Litvaks are very European in that sense and tend to solve their disputes quietly, without airing undue amounts of dirty laundry. So now the Jerusalem Report “journalist” has material for fresh copy: Burstein terminated over disagreement with his employer. It seems as if, in hindsight, he generated the scandals in attempt to have his contract renewed no matter what.
Dovid Katz has been busy trying to stir up discontent on the European Commission, and apparently trying to follow the money-trail, which doesn’t exist in the sense that the planned renovation will not be profitable for decades by the Government’s own admission. Not sensing fresh blood there, the scandal-makers seek to impugn the Committee for the Preservation of Jewish Cemeteries in Europe, the Lithuanian Government’s designated partner for resolving Jewish concerns over the renovation, claiming a wikileaks cable stolen from US embassy Vilnius shows $100,000 allocated to CPJCE for consultations. In fact US embassy Vilnius has been key in forming the new cooperation between the Lithuanian Jewish Community and the Lithuanian Government. If it weren’t for the goadings and proddings of the United States via the embassy, it’s likely there never would have been any restitution from the state budget to the Jewish community, good-will or otherwise. Is the CPJCE making an enormous pile of cash from the deal? Why didn’t the reporter ask them that, instead of pursuing what was clearly his earlier false statement that the CPJCE was not in fact working with the Lithuanian Jewish Community or the Lithuanian government.
The only common sense exhibited in any of the opinion pieces the Jerusalem Post has misrepresented as news articles was this latest tiny passage in a bigger disinformation item from the website on August 26, 2015: “One of the rabbis who signed a letter opposing the plan was Shmuel Auerbach, a prominent Israeli ultra-Orthodox leader. Ginsberg provided the Post with a copy of a subsequent letter from Auerbach stating that he had not meant to cast aspersions on CPJCE founder Rabbi Elyakim Schlesinger and that it is hard to ascertain the facts on the ground in Lithuania from Israel.” Apparently it is too hard for Jpost reporters being used by a small clique to ruin the new cooperation between the Lithuanian Government and the Lithuanian Jewish Community, a cooperation twenty years in the making with much facilitation from the US and the EU.
After the latest delegation of Litvak ultra-Orthodox rabbis ascertain for themselves that the plan is truly sensitive to Jewish concerns and law, where will the scandal-makers turn next? Undoubtedly Katz will try to lure Efraim Zuroff of Simon Wiesenthal Center Jerusalem into the fray, to lend Wiesenthal’s name to what is at base a personal dispute between Katz and Burstein on the one side, and Kukliansky and the Lithuanian state on the other. Their exercise of “soft-power” meaning rumor-mongering, misrepresentation, intrigue and manipulation knows no bounds, and they will surely continue to try to escalate the non-situation by any means necessary. In all likelihood the dignity of their egos will become involved, it will become a personal crusade for decades to come, welcoming ever more obscure authorities into the fold of hecklers, anyone who will speak out against this outrageous plan to renovate a building which by law cannot be torn down and to set up a new monument to the Jews buried under the former Shnipishok cemetery. Weeds, beer bottles, outdoor toilets and syringes are such a fitting tribute to the dead that it’s hard to imagine anything else which could honor the memory of those still buried there, including Count Potocki, the gentile who converted to Judaism and who was burned at the state for apostasy in front of the Old Town Hall in Vilnius.
The dirty little secret here is that Vilnius and Lithuania don’t need a new conference center. There’s plenty of conference space already available, including just down the river at Forum Palace. There’s space around the corner at Holiday Inn, at the new Vilnius municipality building, at Europos centras, and all over the city. What the Government is really doing is try to keep a sizeable territory from falling into utter decrepitude, out of sentiment both for the Palace of Sports, the major venue for decades in Vilnius for basketball matches and pop-music concerts, among other things, but also out of sentiment for Jewish Vilna. The building is so large there could also be a real Holocaust museum housed in just a portion of the lower floor. It would be almost centrally located, rather than hidden in an alley as the only other real Holocaust museum in Lithuania is.
In the early period of Lithuanian independence there was a lot of crime. There was one particularly horrendous crime called apartment-stealing. By hook or by crook, the thieves would either get the pensioner to sign over the apartment on false pretenses, or get their names on the last wills and testaments of the extremely elderly. In some cases they took advantage of alcoholics, getting them drunk then offering them a few thousand for their homes. In Holocaust studies, memory studies, heritage protection and commemoration there is a similar phenomenon which does not have a name yet. It involves collecting memories from the elderly, recording them, sitting on them and doing nothing with them. It also involves using the dead as a weapon. Certain researchers and field investigators who shall remain nameless wouldn’t spend an half hour with some of these people while their alive, but as soon as they die they suddenly become their best friends for decades, if there’s any benefit in claiming that friendship posthumously. The inheritor/best friend/rememberer thus comes to pretend to speak for the dead. What did he or she really say in life? That’s proprietary, and I was his/her only friend, so only I know. There is always a danger inherent in trying to speak for the dead, beyond the danger of arousing the ire of the dybbukim so they come back to tell you personally how things really stand. The danger is misrepresentation. Taking the dead out of context and making them speak to us today is unfair in many cases, they can’t know the prevailing situation. What we have is a sort of compromise instead, and that fuller democracy, which includes the dead and the living, is called tradition. Law if we prefer to call it that. The Palace of Sports is not really a case of colliding codes of conduct, it’s not Soviet vs. Lithuanian vs. Jewish law. The facts on the ground were decided in 1950 and 1969. We have inherited, but we have not killed, in this particular case. Right now the Lithuanian side is fully willing to work with Jewish tradition, and there is very little danger even one existing burial will be disturbed by renovation work. All three traditions can be maintained side by side in this particular case. For very personal reasons certain people are committed to pitting peoples and traditions against one another. Their motivations are not entirely clear, perhaps not even to themselves. Nonetheless there are certain traditions, and there are avenues for discussion, official and unofficial, including official organizations and private interested parties. We would do best to honor the dead by observing the existing traditions and measures we have for maintaining an existing structure and for keeping the former cemetery in pristine form, so that it doesn’t become an eyesore and the eternal abode of people engaged in nefarious deeds in the bushes and the under-growth. There are only two options here, under current constrictions: repair it, or let it fall further into ruin. I think the choice of how best to honor the dead at the location is fairly obvious.