Yad Vashem is increasingly concerned over growing Holocaust revisionism and anti-Semitism
in Lithuania, the Holocaust Memorial announced Monday.
The unusual public rebuke comes a day after swastikas and anti-Semitic graffiti
were found spray-painted on the walls of the Jewish community
centers in central Vilnius, and Lithuanian authorities
press ahead with investigations into Jewish Holocaust
survivors for their wartime activities as partisans in
Lithuania.
"It seems that
the harmful phenomenon of historical revisionism and
distortion, of which the investigation of the Jewish
partisans is a prime example, may actually be increasing
in your country," Yad Vashem chairman Avner Shalev wrote in a August 10 letter to Lithuanian Prime
Minister Gediminas Kirkilas asking for his direct intervention.
"Only by dealing
openly and forthrightly with the full and complex truth
about the past will your nation succeed in building for
itself a secure and stable future," the letter read.
Among the Holocaust survivors
under Lithuanian investigation is Dr. Yitzhak Arad, a
Holocaust historian and former chairman of the Yad Vashem
directorate.
Lithuania opened a criminal
investigation into Arad last year on suspicion that he
took part in the murder of Lithuanian civilians during
the Holocaust.
The investigation came to
light when the Lithuanian prosecutor's office sent the
Israeli Justice Ministry a request to interrogate Arad
in the wake of his memoir, in which he describes his
experiences as a partisan in Nazi-occupied Lithuania.
"It is clear that
initiating criminal proceedings into Dr. Arad's involvement
in Lithuanian partisan activity during World War II is
tantamount to a call for an investigation into all partisan
activity," Shalev wrote in a previous letter to visiting Lithuanian Foreign Minister Petras
Vaitiekunas earlier this year.
During the Holocaust, most
of the Jews of Lithuania were murdered by local citizens.
The "Order
Police" began to massacre Jews as soon as the Soviets left in 1941, before the German
occupation.
Out of a prewar population
of 220,000, only a few thousand Jews survived the war
in Lithuania, representing the largest percentage of
Jews murdered in one country during the Holocaust.
The Lithuanian capital - a
one-time preeminent center for rabbinical studies dating
back to the 16th century - is today home to about 5,000
Jews.
Separately, the chief Nazi-hunter
of the Los Angles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center has accused
the Lithuanian authorities of failing to adequately respond
to several recent anti-Semitic provocations as well as
protecting local Nazi war criminals from prosecution
and instead harassing Jewish anti-Nazi Soviet partisans.
"Given the woefully
inadequate response by the government to the neo-Nazi
march through the center of Vilnius less than half a
year ago, I believe that the time has come for unequivocal,
resolute and immediate action to identify and punish
those responsible for this anti-Semitic attack," Dr. Efraim Zuroff wrote in a separate letter to the Lithuanian Ambassador to
Israel Asta Skaisgiryté-Liauskienè.
"There is no doubt
in my mind that these outbreaks of anti-Jewish violence
are the direct result of Lithuania's failure to punish
its Nazi collaborators, the recent campaign against Soviet
Jewish partisans and the ongoing efforts to minimize
the role of Lithuanians in the mass murder of their Jewish
neighbors during the Holocaust."
"Today's anti-Semitic
violence is the direct result of ignoring the crimes
of the past," the letter concluded.
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