Ponar, May 5, BNS–During the annual commemoration of Holocaust victims Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky Thursday blasted decisions by migration officials not to grant Lithuanian citizenship to Litvaks–Lithuanian Jews–and their offspring who left the country between the two world wars.
During the official ceremony on Holocaust Remembrance Day at Ponar, Kukliansky said Lithuanian officials needed “history lessons.”
The event consisted of a march lasting under 20 minutes with marchers carrying Lithuanian and Israeli flags from the Ponar railroad station to the Paneriai (Ponar) Memorial Complex, where the commemorative ceremony too place. This is the route Jews of the Vilnius ghetto marched before they were murdered in the Ponar forest.
Kukliansky in her speech there criticized decisions which have been on-going for some time not to restore Lithuanian citizenship to Litvaks living in Israel and South Africa who left Lithuania in the interwar period.
“We never surrendered them [Lithuanian passports] voluntarily, we never renounced them, but bureaucrats are telling us we shouldn’t have fled Lithuania, everything was fine, and maybe you wouldn’t have died… never mind that only 5 percent of those who stayed survived,” Kukliansky said. “It seems it’s not just school and university students who need history lessons, it’s bureaucrats as well, who make decisions about people’s fates,” she added.
Under the Lithuanian law on citizenship, people who left Lithuania before March 11, 1990 may become Lithuanian citizens, as may their offspring. About one thousand Jews living in South Africa have made use of the law, but about the middle of last year the process of restoring citizenship ground to a halt.
In issuing negative decisions, migration specialists say they’re applying court decisions which found citizenship can only be restored for people who left the country before 1990 for political reasons, opposing the occupational regime or because of persecution by that regime. Lithuanian officials say Jews didn’t experience persecution in Lithuania between the world wars.
On Thursday the Government hosted an event to honor 11 recognized Righteous Gentiles who saved Jews, including interwar Lithuanian president Kazys Grinius and his wife Kristina Griniuvienė.
This annual ceremony often includes representatives from all sorts of Lithuanian government agencies, foreign diplomats and Jews from Lithuania and abroad. One such was 67-year-old businessman Nachum Purman who came from Israel and says he’s a second-generation Litvak. He has family living in Šiauliai currently. “Our task is to pass on knowledge to our children, to remember and never forget. I am doing that just as the older generation did it for me,” he told BNS.
The Yad Vashem Holocaust Studies Center and Holocaust Commemroation Agency in Israel has recognized more than 800 people from Lithuania as Righteous Gentiles.
The March of the Living event is in its 8th year at Ponar and is held annually on Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, Yom ha Shoah. It began in 1988 in Poland as an itinerary for students from Israel and around the world to visit the concentration camp sites and gradually became an annual marching event from Auschwitz to Birkenau. Marches of the Living are held at a number of locations annually now.
Photos: lrytas.lt
