Holocaust – Page 56 – Lithuanian Jewish Community

Property of Murdered Jews Cannot Be Shrugged Off

by Vytautas Bruveris

How should the state and its politicians act when they come across some sort of passionate, sensitive issue, or one which causes controversy: should they stick their heads in the sand, or nonetheless speak and discuss it?

It seems as if it’s a lot more useful and clever to talk. This seemingly self-evident matter, though, seems to be a mystery to almost the complete majority of Lithuania’s political elite.

This eternal truth was again confirmed last week at a conference held by the Lithuanian Jewish Community (LJC) and the Goodwill Foundation on restitution of Jewish property stolen during the Holocaust.

2019-12-132020-01-03

How the World Discovered the Holocaust

by Laura Kešytė

When did filmmakers start working on the topic of the Holocaust? How did they choose to portray it? Is it possible to present the horror of the Holocaust on camera? Cultural historian Violeta Davoliūtė-Opgenorth talks about this.

Violeta Davoliūtė-Opgenorth is a senior academic at the Lithuanian Cultural Research Center and is a visiting professor at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales. In 2015 and 2016 she worked as an academic at Yale’s Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies. She defended her dissertation “Testimony: From the Poetics of Place to the Politics of Memory” at University of Toronto.

The development of the topic of the Holocaust in cinema in Western Europe, especially in the 1960s and 70s, is closely connected with the trial of Adolf Eichmann and with Hanna Arendt’s articles about the trial compiled in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem and published in 1963, and with Raul Hilberg’s research, whose book published in 1961 distinguished clearly for the first time the categories of perpetrator, observer, judge and victim.

These sparked politically painful discussions in European countries about who the collaborators, victims and observers were in World War II and what their roles were, their prototypes and how to present them properly. This was directly connected with the cinema because the cinema exerted great influence on these discussions and historical research in general: it offered new perspectives for telling the story of WWII to its audiences. In other words, the cinema didn’t just reflect but actively encouraged a shift in the narratives of history.

Full text in Lithuanian here.

2019-12-112019-12-11

Not in Our Name

by Grant Arthur Gochin

The first mass murders of Jews in the Holocaust began in Lithuania. Germany had not yet decided to annihilate the Jews of Europe; they had put forth the idea to relocate Jews to Madagascar or Uganda, but the war made this plan impossible. Lithuania proved to the Nazis that there was indeed an alternative.

Between occupations by Russia and Germany in 1941, Lithuania was governed by an interim Provisional Government, led by Prime Minister Juozas Ambrazevičius Brazaitis. The Lithuanian Provisional Government displayed to Nazis how easily a population could be enticed into perpetrating genocide.

Upon Nazi arrival, Einsatzkommando 2 of the German Security Police asserted charge of murders of Jews. Einsatzkommando 2 reported the murder of 114,856 Lithuanian Jews as early as December 1, 1941. One hundred and thirty-nine Nazi personnel, of whom forty-four were secretaries and drivers, and ninety-five were murderers, directed this slaughter. Local Lithuanians enthusiastically and voluntarily conducted the looting, raping, torture, enslavement and murders of their Jewish neighbors. Thereafter, Germany introduce the Final Solution of the Jewish problem in January 1942.

Full text here.

2019-12-09

Presentation by Joachim Tauber at Holocaust Property Restitution Conference

Among other notables, renowned German historian Joachim Trauber delivered a presentation at the Goodwill Foundation’s conference on Jewish property restitution held at the Lithuanian Jewish Community this week. Professor Trauber is a lecturer at the Institute for the Culture and History of the Germans in Northeast Europe of the Nordost-Institut at the University of Hamburg in Lüneburg and is a member of Lithuania’s International Commission for Assessing the Crimes of the Nazi and Communist Occupational Regimes in Lithuania as well as of similar commissions in Latvia and elsewhere. He is the author of number books and academic articles about the Holocaust in Lithuania and Northeast Europe. We are please to be able to post a copy of the slideshow presentation he gave Monday for those who were unable to attend the conference in Vilnius.

holocaust in lithuania 1941-1944_6

2019-12-052019-12-17

Presentation by International Law Expert Dirk Haupt at Holocaust Restitution Conference

International law expert Dirk Haupt of Lund University in Sweden delivered a presentation at the conference held at the Lithuanian Jewish Community on December 2 organized by the Goodwill Foundation and dedicated to discussing Jewish property restitution in Lithuania and Europe. We are pleased to be able to share his slideshow presentation below with those who were unable to attend.

haupt dirk roland - presentation 2019-12-02 compensating for nazi injustice and indemnifying jewish victims - the german experience2

2019-12-052019-12-16

EJC President Kantor Praises French Parliament Resolution to Fight Anti-Semitism

Wednesday, December 4, 2019–European Jewish Congress president Dr. Moshe Kantor praised the French National Assembly’s decision adopting the IHRA working definition of anti-Semitism and recognizing explicitly that this includes hatred against the state of Israel as a Jewish state.

“We applaud this decision because it is logical and important,” Dr. Kantor said. “Anti-Zionism is almost always just a mask for hatred of Jews and Jewish collectivity and is just the most modern manifestation of the oldest hatred.”

“In the past, anti-Semites used religious, racial and ethnic slurs, and now they use national. Anti-Zionists co-opt all the worst antisemitic libels and motifs throughout history against Jews and merely reapply them to the Jewish state.”

The motion passed with 154 in favor and 72 opposed in the parliament’s lower house. It was proposed by lawmaker Sylvain Maillard of La Republique en Marche, president Emmanuel Macron’s centrist party.

2019-12-042019-12-04

LJC Hosts Regional Conference on Holocaust Restitution

Marking the 10th anniversary of the Terezin declaration, the Lithuanian Jewish Community hosted a regional conference on Holocaust restitution issues Monday.

The conference covered experience of communities in other European countries in the return of Jewish property stolen during the Holocaust. Renowned Holocaust historians and others gave presentations and spoke on the past and goals and tasks for the future.

Rabbi Andrew Baker, director of international Jewish affairs at the American Jewish Committee, knows the issues in Lithuania well. He was a participant in Lithuania’s road towards restitution and the small country’s historic decision in 2011 to pay compensation worth 37 million euros to be used to support Jewish community life. The Goodwill Foundation was formed then to manage these monies. Baker spoke about class-actions suits brought by attorneys representing Jews in America. He noted Austria and France have solved the problem of property restitution. Austria has paid out compensation for pre-war property and France has done the same.

2019-12-042019-12-11

Regimes Change, but Cowards and Brown-Nosers Don’t

by Arkadijus Vinokuras

The epic of the presentation of the play Mūsiškiai [Our People] by the Juozas Miltinis Theater in Panevėžys, Lithuania, just demonstrates once again that the cowardly and obsequious appear to travel through time: they stay exactly the same under all systems of government.

The possession of these character traits turns their owner into the worst kind of tool in the hands of any kind of government. It doesn’t matter if it’s a Nazi, Communist or democratic regime. In all of them, the coward becomes an ultra-patriot ready to carry out any order by the government or mob, for example, by banning a play someone doesn’t like without even viewing it beforehand.

Who will take responsibility for the persecution of theater art director Andrius Jevsejevas? Who will take responsibility for the critique of Polish playwright Michal Walczak by someone who either did read the play or did not, but in any case didn’t understand it? Who will apologize to the highly talented young actors who performed their roles flawlessly? Who at the theater will take responsibility for the idiotic requirement in the contract with the playwright that his work must have no connection with Rūta Vanagaitė’s book Mūsiškiai?

The wild spirit of the Soviet Party political enforcers roams the perfomance spaces. It would appear that, out of fear of the street or out of fear of some sorts of bureaucrats, acting theater director A. Venckus didn’t even welcome the creators of the play during the premiere. Well, cowards shouldn’t become theater directors, because theater is for the courageous. Although it takes real civic courage to express one’s opinion in a dictatorship, this is the basic norm in the frame of democratic government.

2019-12-032019-12-16

Goodwill Foundation Conference on Holocaust Restitution Update

Press Release (updated)

Regional Consultation about Restitution of Holocaust Era Assets

Next week regional consultation regarding restitution of Holocaust era assets will be held in Vilnius. The experiences of returning assets of European countries will be reviewed and well-known historians will present their research about what happened in Lithuanian during WWII.

The conference is dedicated to commemorate the 10th anniversary of Terezin declaration. In 2009 47 countries, Lithuania among them, has signed the document in Prague and announced a program of activities directed at securing assistance, compensation and commemoration of Nazi victims’ memory. It is noteworthy the countries stressed the importance of ensuring communal and private property restitution.

“Noting the importance of restituting communal and individual immovable property that belonged to the victims of the Holocaust (Shoah) and other victims of Nazi persecution, the Participating States urge that every effort be made to rectify the consequences of wrongful property seizures, such as confiscations, forced sales and sales under duress of property, which were part of the persecution of these innocent people and groups, the vast majority of whom died heirless,” the Terezin declaration says.

2019-11-292019-11-29

Teens Suspected of Vandalizing Mosque and Synagogue in Kaunas

Teenagers are suspected of vandalizing a mosque and a synagogue in Lithuania’s second-largest city Kaunas.

The windows of a mosque in the city center were smashed November 17 and a “Heil Hitler” inscription was discovered on the synagogue sign on November 23. Police in Kaunas believe the two crimes were committed by the same people.

Working with the Jewish and Muslim religious communities, three people including two males aged 17 and 18 and a female aged 15 were identified. They are now being questioned and officers are taking other actions as part of an ongoing pre-trial investigation.

The 17-year-old boy is suspected only of taking part in damage to the mosque while the other two are suspected of that criminal act committed on November 17 and the synagogue attack on November 23. The Kaunas Mosque is a protected heritage site and is Lithuania’s only brick-and-mortar mosque; the others are made of wood. The Kaunas Mosque has been the target of vandals repeatedly with the last previous major act of vandalism on September 21, according to 15min.lt and other sources. The Kaunas Muslim community asked for the public’s help in identifying security-camera footage of the three assailants in the latest attack. Both attacks on the mosque damaged stained-glass windows and in the earlier one a collection box with money, office equipment and a laptop computer were stolen.

The 18-year-old is in custody and the 15-year-old girl has been handed over to her parents.

2019-11-292019-12-11

Photographic Facts: Interwar Newspaper Verslas (“Business”) Heavily Fertilized Ground for Events of 1941

by Pinchos Fridberg and Polina Pailis

Slogan “Lithuania for Lithuanians”

[Photo: banner: “Lithuania for Lithuanians,” inscription: “The Pavasarininkai [literally “spring workers”] carried these kinds of banners and the coat of arms of Lithuanian businessmen through the streets of Kaunas during their Anniversary Congress.”]

This slogan didn’t just appear yesterday or the day before. We see it in the photograph over 80 years ago. And it wasn’t just in some small rural newspaper, but on the first page of the well-known weekly Verslas (“Business”) on July 7, 1938, published by the Union of Lithuanian Merchants, Industrialists and Tradesmen, 1932-1940, Kaunas.

We would like to point out the banners featuring hatred of other ethnic groups were carried by religious youth. The Pavasarininkai were members of the Federation of Lithuanian Catholic Youth, of whom there were about 100,000 in 1940.

2019-11-282019-12-11

Arūnas Bubnys to Launch New Book about Ponar at Vilnius Jewish Public Library

Historians Arūnas Bubnys and Ilja Lempertas will launch Bubnys’s new Lithuanian book on the mass murder of Jews at Ponar at the Vilnius Jewish Public Library located at Gedimino prospect no. 24 in Vilnius at 6:00 P.M. on November 28. The event will be in Lithuanian.

2019-11-272019-11-29

The Columns of Gediminas: Symbol of Lithuanian Statehood

Seven hundred years ago the Lithuanian grand duke Gediminas used this symbol on letters inviting Jews to come settle in Lithuania and contribute to the creation of the state.

Over many centuries Lithuanian Jews–Litvaks–considered themselves citizens of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and worked to improve the state in common with ethnic Lithuanians and the other peoples who lived here.

In 1919 and 1920 Litvak members of the Union for Liberating Independent Lithuania rose up under this banner to fight for the freedom of their country and many of them perished fighting under the Lithuanian-Jewish battle flag decorated with the columns of Gediminas.

2019-11-252019-12-11

Kaunas Synagogue Vandalized with Heil Hitler Graffiti

The entrance to the Choral Synagogue in Kaunas was vandalized with a Heil Hitler inscription in black paint. The desecration was discovered Saturday morning and was likely committed during the foregoing night.

Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky says this anti-Semitic attack against the synagogue in Kaunas confirms attacks on Jews are continuing. There have been five in just the last few months in Vilnius, Kaunas and Šiauliai. Despite criminal investigations, no one has been brought to account so far.

Police spokesman Ramūnas Matonis told BNS said the incidents were undoubtedly anti-Semitic. He said investigations have been started on sowing ethnic discord.

LJC chairwoman Kukliansky said the attacks coming just before important Lithuanian Jewish events were especially surprising.

2019-11-252019-11-29

Goodwill Foundation Announcement on Holocaust Restitution

November 22, 2019

Press Release

Regional Consultation on Restitution of Holocaust-Era Assets

At the beginning of December a regional conference on the restitution of Holocaust-era assets will be held in Vilnius. The experiences of returning assets of European countries will be reviewed and well-known historians will present their research about what happened in Lithuania during WWII.

The conference is dedicated to commemorate the 10th anniversary of Terezin declaration. In 2009, 47 countries, Lithuania among them, signed the document in Praha and announced a program of activities directed at securing assistance, compensation and commemoration of the memory of the victims of the Nazis. It’s noteworthy these countries stressed the importance of ensuring communal and individual property restitution.

2019-11-22

Survey of Anti-Semitism in the European Union

Dear friends and colleagues,

Tomorrow, 81 years ago, the Nazi regime ordered a concentrated pogrom against Jewish communities. At least 91 Jews were murdered, hundreds of synagogues were burnt down and thousands of Jewish-owned businesses and houses were looted. Krytasllnacht or the Night of Broken Glass would be remembered as the beginning of the Holocaust and the extermination of six million Jews. More than 75 years after the Holocaust some prefer to think anti-Semitism has been banished from our societies, yet as we witness again and again violence and murder inspired by a hatred of Jews, we can see that anti-Semitism remains deeply ingrained in Europe. The anti-Semitic attack last month on the synagogue in Halle, Germany, once again reminded us anti-Semitism remains a threat to our European values and that we must remember we have responsibilities arising from our shared history.

2019-11-11

Remembering the Great Aktion in Kaunas

The Kaunas Jewish Community conducted the sad annual commemoration of the Great Aktion in Kaunas at the end of October. The largest single mass-murder episode in the Holocaust in Lithuania, the Great Aktion was the murder of around 10,000 people in a 24-hour period at the Ninth Fort on October 28 and 29, 1941. “Aktion” is the word the Nazis applied to their mass murder operations.

Members of the Kaunas Jewish Community unveiled a stele or stone marker this year dedicated to preserving the memory of the Kaunas ghetto ältestenrat, or council of elders. The stele was commissioned by the city of Kaunas.

A survivor, Fruma Kučinskienė, spoke about the council, its head Elchanan Elkes and her memory of undergoing the selection of victims for the Great Aktion by the war criminal Helmut Rauca on Democrat Square in the ghetto. Rauca was discovered living in Canada after the war where he ran a resort.

It is believed the 10,000 or so victims included around 4,300 children.

2019-11-062019-11-19

Juozas Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis Was Neither Exonerated Nor Rehabilitated

by Arkadijus Vinokuras

That was what U.S. congressman Brad Sherman told Lithuanian prime minister Saulius Skvernelis in his letter. He asked the prime minister to provide evidence demonstrating Juozas Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis, the head of the Lithuanian Provisional Government in 1941, was rehabilitated and acquitted by the U.S. Congress and the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service in 1974. Because this is something the Lithuanian Genocide Center has been claiming for about 10 years now. The congressman said this belief is baseless and contradicts U.S. law.

Sherman in the letter says without any doubt the Genocide Center’s findings on the exoneration and rehabilitation of the former LPG leader has no legal foundation at all. He says an investigation in 1974 was dropped because the man died and there was a lack of documents on Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis’s activities in Holocaust crimes. He said the U.S. Justice Department created a new section in 1979 which with the appearance of new information went on to investigate 60 Nazi criminals who had immigrated to the United States.

Why weren’t documents found? First, in 1944 Juozas Ambrazevičius changed his name to Juozas Brazaitis. In other words, he hid the fact of his change of surname from the U.S. immigration service. Second, the U.S. had a policy after the war of granting immunity to alleged war criminals who had information of use to the Central Intelligence Agency. Third, the section created by the Justice Department in 1979 had a staff of just three people who had no training or experience in investigating Holocaust crimes. Fourth, the Lithuanian archives only opened their doors after the fall of the Soviet empire.

2019-11-042019-12-04

Rule of Law? Not Funny

by Arkadijus Vinokuras

Today’s Lithuania has utterly failed to give birth to political visionaries prepared to replace society’s erroneous tolerance of legal nihilism. What other explanation could there be for president Gitanas Nausėda’s reluctance to criticize the wanton behavior of the nationalists? It seems the state has been encompassed by legal paralysis again, just as in the “good old days” of the violet criminals [apparently a reference to a pedophilia scandal in Lithuania–translator].

It requires exceptional courage to change society’s flawed tenets. Especially when a portion of citizens consumed by fear still seek strength from Lithuania’s authoritarian past.

Looking back over 30 years of Lithuanian society’s process of becoming freer, one cannot fail to see this process has become stuck. Over these years no Lithuanian political party has been able to look directly without fear at Lithuanian history in the bloody years from 1941 to 1944. No political party has been able to offer an alternative to the pre-war authoritarian nationalism which holds no respect for the principles of the legal state and the rule of law.

2019-11-042019-12-03

AJC Hosts Vilnius Mayor Remigijus Šimašius in Washington

October 30, 2019 — Washington, D.C.

At an American Jewish Committee (AJC) reception, Vilnius Mayor Remigijus Šimašius was praised for his efforts to correct the narrative around Lithuanian complicity in the Holocaust.

Earlier this summer, Šimašius oversaw two important decisions regarding Holocaust memory in Lithuania. The first was changing the name of a street honoring Kazys Skirpa, founder of the Lithuanian Activist Front (LAF) resistance organization, and the second was removing a plaque honoring Jonas Noreika, an anti-Soviet fighter who was responsible for the imprisonment of Šiauliai Jews and seizure of their property during the Holocaust.

2019-11-042019-11-08