The Vilnius municipality’s webpage madeinvilnius.lt reports a mural depicting a Jewish scholar called “The Sage” was defaced by graffiti recently. The mural is located in the Vilnius Old Town adjacent to what was the city’s Jewish quarter for a time and the Jewish ghetto instituted by the Nazis.

Reporter Šarūnas Černiauskas wrote about the vandalism on facebook: “Something nasty happened. The most known work in the ‘The Walls Remember’ project dedicated to preserving the historical memory of Lithuanian Jews, the mural ‘The Sage,’ was intentionally damaged. The people who did this obviously wanted to ruin the painting. I think this smacks of anti-Semitism. I went there today, recorded it and filed a complaint with the police.”

Černiauskas called on members of the public to come forward to police concerning the act of vandalism. He also called for any video footage from adjacent cameras to be sent to him and police.

The mural was heavily damaged. The mural “Street Musicians” in the same series was defaced with the name “Ivan,” presumably a pejorative for “Russian” rather than a tagger’s name.

Full story in Lithuanian with photographs here.