Chairman of the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs Ed Royce (R-CA) lambasted the United Nations Human Rights Council on Friday for adopting a resolution condemning Israel over alleged war crimes during last summer’s Operation Protective Edge.

“This resolution is a black mark on the Human Rights Council,” Royce declared, adding that “it undermines prospects for direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians to resolve their differences.”

Royce questioned the absence of any condemnation of Hamas’ alleged war crimes, which were indicated in the U.N. report but absent from the resolution. He wondered why the resolution failed to mention Israeli attempts to “minimize civilian casualties.”

“Today, the U.N. Human Rights Council kept up its record of bombarding Israel with biased and shameful resolutions. The goal of this international campaign against Israel is to question the democratic country’s right to self-defense to the point of rendering it virtually meaningless,” he said.

The resolution passed on Friday was written by the Palestinians and Arab states, and welcomes the U.N. report on the 2014 Gaza war. It ignores completely Hamas’ indiscriminate firing of rockets at Israeli cities, as well as alleged war crimes by Palestinian groups in Gaza, though several were indicated by the report.

The resolution passed the UNHRC with full European backing, and the U.S. was the only country to vote against it. Five countries — India, Kenya, Ethiopia, Macedonia and Paraguay — abstained.

Israeli lawmaker and chairman of the Yesh Atid Party, Yair Lapid, criticized the eight sitting European members for voting in favor, declaring “no limit to Europe’s hypocrisy.”

“While in Israel ‘Code Red’ sirens are sounding and the residents of the south are once again living under the intolerable cloud of terrorism, countries like Germany, France and the Britain voted in favor of a report which at best is a bad joke and at worst a symbol of the world’s hypocrisy,” he said, as a rocket fired by terrorists exploded in Israel on Friday.

According to Israeli daily Haaretz, officials in the Prime Minister’s Office expressed gratitude for the U.S.’s moral stand in voting against the resolution, which called for the end of impunity for Israeli officials who oversaw the Operation.

algemeiner.com

In 1941, when the fascist invaders invaded Lithuania, all the men of the families of my relatives were killed, and my father Julian Geizeriker (1898 born) evacuated to the rear of the USSR. His father worked as a driver and drove in Russia some documents on summer 1941. He suggested that we all go with him, because Svencionys was restless, but my mom Sonia knew that the children would be difficult on the road, and decided to stay. She did not believe that intelligent Germans would shoot. Back to return my father could no longer remained in the USSR. He called himself the name of his cousin Khonon. He also used name Khonon in the passport.

Read more 

A somber memorial was held last week to mark the 74th anniversary of the Lietūkis Garage massacre and the Kaunas pogrom in Lithuania, in which thousands of Jews were killed in just a few days.

The ceremony was held in a courtyard in the center of the city last Friday and attended by Israeli ambassador Amir Maimon as well as staff from the recently inaugurated Israeli Embassy in Vilnius, which opened its doors in March.

But no Lithuanian officials bothered to attend the commemoration, despite the fact that it was Lithuanian volunteers who by eyewitness accounts largely committed the slaughter.

Read more

Dear Colleagues

Below our attempt to keep up with the most recent public debate documents concerning the fate of the old Vilna Jewish cemetary at Piramónt  (now in the Šnipiškės section of Vilnius). Thanks so much to those who have sent us materials to enable us to keep our coverage as complete as possible. If there are errors or omissions, please do let us know, with thanks in anticipation.

3 July 2015.  Der Yid: ‘Central Rabbinical Congress to Lithuania and the EU: Return the entire Vilna Jewish cemetery to its Jewish owners’ [in Yiddish: Hisákhdus Horabónim tsu Líte un E.U. lénder: Git tsurík far yidn dem gantsn vilner beys-hakháyim].

2 July 2015.  Defending History: ‘Central Rabbinical Congress of the USA and Canada Protests Desecration of the Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery’.

2 July 2015.  Defending History: ‘Vilna Gaon Synagogue in Tel Aviv posts protest against Vilnius convention center plan for old Jewish Cemetery.

2 July 2015.  Defending History: ‘Israel’s leading Litvak rabbis issue impassioned protest against convention center plans for the old Vilna Jewish cemetery’.

30 June 2015.  Defending History: ‘Rabbinic Judgment on the old Vilna Jewish cemetery’ by Rabbi Shmuel Jacob Feffer [in rabbinic Hebrew]. Digital Hebrew version.

25 June 2015.  The Times of Israel: ‘Dancing on Jewish Graves in Vilna’ by Pinchos Fridberg.

Seventy-four years ago the territory of the Lietūkis Garage of the Lithuanian Agricultural Cooperative in Kaunas became the venue for one of the worst mass murders of Jews in Lithuania and Europe, Kaunas Jewish Community leader Gercas Žakas said Friday at a ceremony to commemorate the victims of the massacre.

“I believe that this pogrom at the Lietūkis Garage was one of the most brutal, not just in Kaunas, not just in Lithuania, but throughout Europe. The sort of brutalities which took place here are difficult to
comprehend,” Žakas said.

She was happy about winning the highest score in the photography contest and was already leaving through the door satisfied when she heard she won not a single category but took all categories as Best New Talent in the competition held in Jerusalem. Milda Rūkaitė achieved this success back in 2009 but still happily recalls and savors the victory, Stilius [Style] magazine of the Lithuanian newspaper Lietuvos rytas reports.

Winning the contest allowed her to fulfill one of her dreams: to photograph Shimon Peres, when he was still the president of Israel. … Milda didn’t go looking for it, but one job came to her: the mayor of the
city of Arad, Tali Ploskov, approached the Lithuanian woman to become his personal photographer. …

More in Lithuanian HERE

During the Šeduva town holiday on June 27 the Šeduva Jewish Memorial Fund, which is implementing the “Lost Shtetl” project, donated a fully-equipped four-wheel drive Ford Transit ambulance to the municipality’s First Aid Medical Dispensary. The Fund also donated the latest equipment, including electronic scales for weighing newborns, blood analysis equipment and  computer equipment, to the Šeduva walk-in clinic. The value of the donations to the dispensary and clinic totaled just under 150,000 euros.

More information available in Lithuanian HERE

After a meeting in June by representatives of the Israeli embassy to Lithuania and the Lithuanian Federation of Athletics Sports, the embassy undertook to support the largest disabled sports event in the nation’s history, the IBSA European Goalball (blind football) Championship, to be held July 8 to 11 in Kaunas.

“I have always been impressed by people who despite difficulties strive for the highest goals. Since the beginning of my work in Lithuania I have observed actively current events in the country and have striven for specific goals through my actions. Having communicated with representatives of the Lithuanian Federation of Blind Athletics and having learned about their extremely high achievements, achieved despite all sorts of obstacles and lack of funding, I realized we were on the same path. I believe in the inexhaustible powers and potentials of the human being, but I also understand that sometimes help, whether it be moral support or a financial contribution, is necessary,” Israel’s ambassador to Lithuania Amir Maimon said.

The Goodwill Fund will hold a conference on June 30 concerning the work of the fund. The conference will include on its agenda organizational questions connected with the governance and effective functioning of the Goodwill Fund. Goodwill Fund directors LJC chair Faina Kukliansky and director of International Jewish Affairs for the American Jewish Committee Rabbi Andrew Baker (USA) will deliver reports at the conference. The board of directors of the Goodwill Fund state in the report of Goodwill Fund activities that strategy will continue to be honed and internal control mechanisms strengthened. The Goodwill Fund is successfully implementing the following international projects: The Bagel Shop (campaign to encourage tolerance and fight anti-Semitism), the Rothschild Foundation (Hanadiv) in Europe’s project to preserve Jewish heritage and the third successful project with the YIVO Jewish research institute to preserve the past.

The public enterprise Goodwill Fund for Distributing Compensation for Real Estate Property of Jewish Religious Organizations was established at the end of 2011 after the Law on the Goodwill Compensation of Real Estate Property of Jewish Religious Organizations drafted on the initiative of the Lithuanian Government was passed into law. The fund was established by the Lithuanian Jewish Heritage Fund (Lietuvos žydų paveldo fondas) with the cooperation of the LJC and the World Jewish Restitution Organization. Under the law adopted, the state budget will pay out compensation of 128 million litas (3,450,000 euros) annually until 2023 to be used for financing Lithuanian Jewish religious, cultural, health, sport, educational and academic projects in Lithuania.

European Jewry is all in the same boat, and that boat is slowly but surely sinking. That, at least, was the impression from a roundtable conversation Tuesday at the Jerusalem Press Club with leaders from 25 of the continent’s Jewish communities.

During the hour and a half lunch in a picturesque hall overlooking Jerusalem’s Old City, even those leaders who claimed their countries are without anti-Semitism today were pessimistic about the future of Europe. The obliviousness to a looming Nazi regime pervasive in 1930s Jewish communities was referenced, as were the increased Boycott, Divest and Sanctions (BDS) efforts that have taken over Scandinavia and elsewhere.

The 30-odd leaders were assembled under the banner “A Time for Action” for the fifthIsraeli Jewish Congress (Hakhel) Gathering and Solidarity Mission to Israel of senior European Jewish leaders. The IJC was founded as a conduit for Diaspora-Israel dialogue in 2011 by Russian businessman Vladimir Sloutsker, a former senator in the Russian Federation Senate.