Last month, I was invited
to attend two important conferences convened to combat contemporary
anti-Semitism. The larger and ostensibly more important one was the
annual meeting of the Global Forum to Combat Anti-Semitism, which
is sponsored by the Foreign Ministry and deals with the diverse forms
of the problem all over the world. Its 500 participants include government
officials, representatives of all the major Diaspora NGOs in the
field and leading intellectuals and activists. From past experience,
I know that it is a good venue to meet colleagues and exchange ideas,
even if the speeches and deliberations are becoming annoyingly repetitive
year after year.
The second conference, which was sponsored by the World Congress
of Russian Jewry, was entitled "The Legacy of World War II and
the Holocaust," and focused solely on the recent efforts in
numerous post-communist countries to rewrite the history of the Holocaust
and attempt to obtain official recognition that the crimes of communism
are just as bad or worse than those of the Nazis.
The major motivation behind these efforts is to minimize the role
of local collaborators in Nazi crimes and instead focus attention
on the atrocities perpetrated by communists, and especially the Jews
among them, thereby creating a false symmetry of genocidists, designed
to silence Jewish criticism of the role played by Lithuanians, Latvians,
Estonians, Ukrainians, Croatians, etc. in the Holocaust, provide
a justification for past and current local anti-Semitism and to switch
the public's perception of the population of these countries from
perpetrators of the most heinous crime to its victims.
The approximately 400 participants from Russia and the Russian-speaking "diaspora" (some
130 from Israel) were primarily leaders of organizations of Jewish
World War II veterans and Jewish communities of Russian origin, as
well as several Holocaust historians and educators.
NORMALLY, I would have gladly attended both conferences but unfortunately
they were scheduled on the same dates on two different continents.
While the Global Forum was meeting in Jerusalem, the conference on
the legacy of the Holocaust was scheduled for Berlin. Given the prestigious
status of the former and the fact that five colleagues of mine were
planning to participate, the natural choice would have been Jerusalem,
but in this case I opted for Berlin because of an extremely unfortunate
decision made by the Foreign Ministry, which I believe will prove
very detrimental to Jewish interests.
I am referring primarily to the invitation to Lithuanian Foreign
Minister Vygaudas Usackas to participate as a special guest of the
forum, but also to the presence there of two right-wing Hungarian
politicians, Zsolt Semjen and Zoltan Balog, both of whom have made
very negative comments about Hungarian Jews. Israel, which naturally
welcomes the far-less-critical approach of the new (Eastern European)
members of the European Union on Middle East affairs has, especially
during the past decade, attempted to court these countries, despite
their general failure to deliver on practically the entire range
of practical Holocaust-related issues from prosecution and restitution
to education and documentation.
Even worse, during the past two years, these countries and especially
the Baltics, have spearheaded the above-mentioned campaign to achieve
official recognition for the canard that communist crimes were just
as bad as those of the Nazis, with all the dangerous implications
thereof in relation to the attitude toward the Shoah.
And if there is a country which especially deserves to be criticized
harshly in this regard it is Lithuania, whose government is actively
helping to finance this campaign, and where its anti-Semitic implications
have reached a despicable low during the past three years. Thus after
making a mockery of the efforts to bring unprosecuted Lithuanian
Nazi war criminals to justice by insuring that even those two local
Security Police commanders and one operative who were prosecuted
would not sit even one day in jail for their crimes, Lithuanian prosecutors
launched investigations against several Jewish Soviet anti-Nazi partisans,
among them Dr. Yitzhak Arad, former chairman of Yad Vashem, on bogus
charges of war crimes against Lithuanians. Accompanied by hysterically
anti-Semitic articles in the nationalist press, the campaign turned
the victims of the Holocaust into perpetrators and the villains who
assisted the Nazis in the mass murder of Jews into patriotic heroes,
a distortion of the historical events much more palatable to the
Lithuanian public.
If Usackas had been invited to Jerusalem to formally announce that
his government was immediately stopping its communism equals Nazism
campaign, would henceforth commit itself to teaching the painful
truth about the extensive role of Lithuanian collaborators in the
mass murder of Jews in Lithuania and elsewhere in Europe, would officially
close all the cases against former Jewish partisans and officially
apologize to them, his invitation to the Global Forum would certainly
have been justified. But that was not the case.
IF ANYTHING, the opposite is true. On December 2, for example, Lithuanian
Justice Minister Remigijus Simasius made a public statement defending
Lithuania's abysmal record of extensive collaboration with the Nazis
during World War II and absolving his countrymen of any blame for
their role in Holocaust crimes. And instead of acknowledging Lithuanian
complicity, he preferred to attack the US for its restrictive immigration
policies during that period.
In fact, even Usackas himself, in a speech delivered a week prior
to the forum, spoke of Lithuanian Righteous Among the Nations and
Nazi collaborators as if they were equivalent phenomenon, despite
the fact that the latter outnumbered the former many times over.
At the forum, the foreign minister repeated this lie, asking "how
could it be that while some Lithuanians were risking their lives
to save their Jewish neighbors, others were committing crimes by
sending them to death?" a sanitized version of the Lithuanian
reality during the Shoah in which many Lithuanians actively participated
in the mass murder of Jews (and not like elsewhere in Europe, where
local collaborators "merely" sent them to their deaths
in Poland) and very few tried to assist them.
And while he did specify that the condemnation of Stalinism "should
never be applied to diminish the moral and political lessons of the
Holocaust," he did not say a word about halting the nefarious
campaign his government is actively supporting to equate communism
and Nazism or its practical implications as formulated in the Prague
Declaration of June 2008, which calls for a joint commemoration day
for the victims of the Nazis and the communists (which would make
one specifically for the Shoah superfluous) and a joint research
institute for totalitarian crimes (which would make institutions
like Yad Vashem redundant).
To add insult to injury, after devoting most of his comments to
the importance of fighting against anti-Semitism, I was told that
the minister and his entire entourage left the forum immediately
after his speech never to return, leaving his hosts without any justification
for their unfortunate decision to give Usackas a very respectable
platform to once again, in typical fashion, distort the history of
the Holocaust and escape the harsh criticism that Lithuanian actions
deserve.
Needless to say, there were no such problems at the Berlin conference,
which was united in its condemnation of Holocaust distortion, especially
in the Baltics and Ukraine, and which undertook to actively combat
these dangerous phenomenon. In that respect, as hard as this is to
believe, this past Hanukka, Berlin was a much more sympathetic venue
to discuss the threat to the accuracy of the historical record of
World War II and to Holocaust memory than was Jerusalem.
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