Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky was one of three distinguished guests on the late morning Aktualiju studijas [News Studio] program on Lithuanian radio May 12.
“This question keeps bothering me: when did the institution of citizenship, when did that institution stop, when was it interrupted? Was it when the person was imprisoned in the ghetto? When he was transported to the concentration camp? Nobody saved those passports anywhere. You see this is such an inhumane, such an unintelligent step when you look to the future. But as the chairwoman of the Lithuanian Jewish Community I would like to say, that Litvaks are welcome in our community, with or without a passport, and we would be very proud if our Lithuanian Jewish Community grew thanks to those people who left Lithuania. So we gladly invite and welcome them without regard to their political status,” Faina Kukliansky said during the discussion.
The main topic for the show as “Why don’t we want to grant citizenship to Litvaks?” The introductory blurb for the show was: “Lithuanian Jews–Litvaks–are not just people who have achieved great things in the world, they contributed greatly to the strengthening of the Lithuanian state as well. They sought Lithuanian independence and they fought in the battles for independence [in 1918-1919]. Unfortunately, almost all of them were murdered during World War II. Only a small portion survived. Today some Lithuanian bureaucrats don’t want to grant citizenship to the small group of Jews who want it. Why not?”
The other two guests were former Lithuanian prime minister, current deputy parliamentary speaker MP Gediminas Kirkilas and the historian Alvydas Nikžentaitis.
The audience was invited to call in and pose questions.
Asked to comment how the problem of the denial of Lithuanian citizenship to Litvaks arose, chairwoman Kukliansky noted the law had been functioning well until just recently, and that the change appears to have been a personal decision by an unknown member of Lithuania’s corpus of public servants. Gediminas Kirkalas expressed the same idea and spoke about the recent sitting of the Lithuanian parliament’s European Affairs Committee where there was general agreement in favor of Lithuanian citizenship for Litvaks and a slight difference of opinion over whether the law on citizenship needed amendments or whether more parliamentary supervision was needed to stop bureaucrats from making unwarranted interpretations.
Two of the four callers were opposed to granting Litvaks Lithuanian citizenship, one rejected the idea of dual citizenship and a lone voice from Kaunas called for inviting more Litvaks in to increase the Jewish population in Lithuania to at least 20,000. One woman said it was fine to talk about positive things Jews had done for Lithuania, but the bad things needed to be stated as well, and asked the audience to remember how Jewish merchants allegedly oppressed Lithuanians before and during Soviet times. Historian Alvydas Nikžentaitis noted more Jews were deported to Siberia than ethnic Lithuanians as a percentage of the total population, and that historians had long ago debunked these and similar myths.
Historian Alvydas Nikžentaitis spoke about the multicultural nature of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and of the interwar Republic of Lithuania until 1926, when official Jewish autonomy in Lithuania was annulled. He said Lithuanians think and behave as if their state were still a major geopolitical player, and called upon Lithuanians to remember the multiculturalism of that earlier grand confederation.
Gediminas Kirkalas said the issue of citizenship for Litvaks has wider ramifications for other ethnic minorities who seek Lithuanian citizenship. He and Nikžentaitis discussed the call for volunteers issued by early Lithuanian independence activists and the fact that many Poles, Russians, Belarusians and Jews came forward at the birth of the modern Lithuanian state in the early 20th century, many sacrificing their lives for Lithuanian independence.
Chairwoman Kukliansky wondered whether many Holocaust survivors had ever renounced their Lithuanian citizenship in any way. She rejected the idea Jews who “withdrew” from Lithuania before 1940 were somehow safe in Lithuania. Much of the furor over the slate of rejections the Migration Department has been issuing to Litvaks seeking Lithuanian citizenship since about the middle of last year revolves around arguments the Lithuanian law on citizenship makes some sort of distinction between those who left on their own volition and who therefore “withdrew,” and those forced to leave by the Nazi or Soviet regime.
A recording of the program in Lithuanian is available here:
http://www.lrt.lt/mediateka/irasas/1012845072/lrt_aktualiju_studija_2016_05_12_11_05
A translation of a small portion of the beginning of the program is provided below:
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Why Don’t We Want to Grant Citizenship to Litvaks?
VS: Hello. Why don’t bureaucrats want to grant citizenship to Litvaks? This is Virginijus Savukinis. Lithuanian Jews–Litvaks—-are not just people with many achievements in the world, they also contributed much to strengthening the Lithuanian state. They sought Lithuanian independence, they fought in the battles for independence [in 1918-1919]. Unfortunately during World War II they were almost all murdered, only a small portion of them survived. And now today some Lithuanian bureaucrats don’t want to grant citizenship to those few Jews who seek it. Why? We will discuss that in the studio today with Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky. Hello.
FK: Hello.
VS: Member of parliament Gediminas Kirkilas, hello.
GK: Hello.
VS: And historian Alvydas Nikžentaitis. Hello.
AN: Hi.
VS: And our listeners can call in and express their opinions, our telephones in Vilnius are… You can also write an email, our email is studija@lrt.lt . So, at this time, the Migration Department has rejected about 200 requests by Litvaks, and about ten of them are in court fighting the department and await decisions by the courts. Mr. Kirkilas, why did this problem arise? Because it seems like before they used to grant citizenship. Why are Litvaks getting rejections on the granting of citizenship?
GK: Well, that’s the problem that has come up, and numerous complaints have reached us, and appeals, and recently, as you know, a delegation of parliamentarians was visiting Israel and there we heard from our–as you know there are several communities there, our Litvaks whom we were meeting–what caused them the most concern and even insulted them wasn’t the rejection of their applications, it was the argumentation provided by our public servants, which was more or less, why are you asking for this? Maybe you didn’t even suffer. And in general there is this level reached in private questions where it almost seems as if someone has started denying that there even was a Holocaust, so you understand. I understand why people are upset. When the law–
VS: What you’ve said is very important. That means that there is anti-Semitism at work here? …
GK: I think that first of all, our public servants often, in solving questions, interpreting laws, want to get some profit out of it, and if a person comes and requests something, the best thing for me to do is to delay, drag it out–
VS: Corruption.
GK: You can call it that. I can’t prove it, but that’s how I imagine it. It’s not just for this one issue that our public servants delay making a decision, on other issues as well, but also this one. So a person comes with a request, we’ll answer in a week, or two, or in a month, or more, and then if he behaves poorly or talks badly to us, we can always take him to court. And then a court case appears in this manner. Several different hearings take place. That’s why the parliamentary European Affairs Committee invited the interior minister, representatives of the Migration Department to speak. Fellow MP the honorable Andrius Kubilius presented a proposed amendment to preclude interpretations based on the vagueness of the law, so that public servants wouldn’t be able to ask and tell people why they withdrew [from the country], because all of us might have to explain that, there were so many different circumstances before the war, the most varied, but the worst thing is that in interpreting the law our public servants have given themselves permission to insult people, our countrymen.
VS: We will speak more later about those interpretations. Mrs. Kukliansky, what do you think, how did this problem come about?
FK: I can’t say why this problem came about, because the law has been in effect since 2010, and the problem has come up now.
VS: And the law was working well?
FK: Initially it did, later someone decided the law should be carried out in a different manner. Now there are court appeals. But I’d really like to explain something to people: the courts are just a secondary stage. The primary one is the institution receiving and examining the request…