The visit to Israel this past week of Lithuanian Prime Minister Andrius Kubilius
went virtually unnoticed by the Israeli media. In fact, the report
by David Lev on Friday on Israel National News ("Is Lithuania Sincere About Owing Up to its Holocaust Past?") was, to the best of my knowledge, the only attempt to assess the most important
aspect of current Lithuanian-Jewish relations, the attitude of the
Baltic republic to its bloody Holocaust past and the extensive complicity
of Lithuanians in the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews
(both in their own country and outside her borders), in the light
of recent attempts by Lithuania and its Baltic neighbors to rewrite
the history of the Shoa [Holocaust, ed.] in a totally distorted manner.
Unfortunately, however, rather than exposing this insiduous campaign, which has
strong and very dangerous anti-Semitic undertones, the article was
an interview with Yisrael Rosenson, the author of a recent book on
LIthuania, which contained a totally opposite assessment of the current
situation. Rosenson is not only woefully misinformed, but tried especially
hard to paint present a positive assessment of Lithuanian intentions
and policy on Holocaust issues, for reasons I can only surmise.
Thus, according to Yisrael Rosenson of the Efrata Teachers College
in Jerusalem, "at
least some elements of the country's society are making a very
sincere effort [my emphasis-EZ] to reevaluate their behavior, to
make an honest accounting of their crimes against the Jews." Apparently Rosenson is referring to the government officials in charge of Holocaust
education in Lithuania, who according to him have established a
national "Holocaust educational center which coordinates programs for all children in all
the country's schools." In addition, he claims that "There are Holocaust research centers in Lithuanian universities, with many studies
discussing the Lithuanian people's failures regarding the Jews."
If these facts were indeed accurate, there be a basis
for Rosenson's positive appraisal of the sincerity of at least part
of contemporary Lithuanian society in this regard, but unfortunately
his information is all wrong and in fact the situation in this regard
is far worse than he could ever imagine.
First of all, there is no national center for Holocaust education.
The subject has been entrusted to three institutions, which instead
of preserving the accepted narrative of the Shoa, have been leading
the campaign to equate Communist crimes with those of the Nazis
in an effort to undermine the status of the Holocaust as a unique
historical tragedy. I am referring to the International Commission
For The Evaluation Of The Crimes Of The Nazi And Soviet Occupations,
whose name clearly indicates its agenda and stance on the false
equivalency between Nazi and Soviet crimes being actively promoted
by the Lithuanian authorities.
The second is the Genocide and Resistance Research
Center, whose attitude toward Holocaust issues is clearly manifest
in its Museum of Genocide Victims in the heart of Vilnius, which
does not even mention the Holocaust or the mass murder site of Ponar,
but stresses the Jewish origin of Communist officials in blatantly
anti-Semitic cartoons in its permanent exhibition.
The third organization involved is the Vilnius Tolerance
Center headed by Emanuel Zingeris, a Jewish member of the Seimas,
who no longer is a member of the local Jewish community and is one
of the key operatives in the efforts of the Lithuanian government
to promote the Prague Declaration of June 3, 2008, the main manifesto
of the false equivalency movement.
As far as Lithuanian universities are concerned, not a single one
has a Holocaust research center, nor are there any courses on Holocaust
history. In fact, just this past summer, Vilnius University purged
its most prominent Jewish professor, world-renowned Yiddish expert
Prof. Dovid Katz, who has been teaching there the past eleven years,
and whose primary sin was his courageous defense of several elderly
Holocaust survivors who fought with the Soviet anti-Nazi partisans
and who were accused in the local nationalist press of committing "war
crimes" against innocent Lithuanian civilians.
These trumped-up charges against Jewish heroes, whose
only hope of survival was to join the partisans, is part of the false
symmetry being promoted by the Lithuanian authorities in order to
relativize the Holocaust crimes of Lithuanians, as if they were the
mirror image of similar or equivalent crimes by Jews against Lithuanians,
and thereby deflect the fully-justified criticism of Lithuanian behavior
during the Shoa. Of course, if the campaign to equalize Communist
and Nazi crimes were to succeed, that would turn the Lithuanians
from a "nation of killers" into a "nation of victims," which would do wonders to erase their guilt for Shoa crimes.
Rosenson is also wrong when it comes to the important issue of
the prosecution of Nazi war criminals. He correctly points out
that there was very strong resistance to doing so in Lithuania,
but offers the explanation that there was similar opposition to
such trials in other countries, pointing to France which did not
try Lyon Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie until the eighties. What he
neglects to mention is that the only reason there were any trials
whatsoever of Lithuanian Nazi war criminals in independent Lithuania
was external pressure from the US, Israel, and the Wiesenthal Center
and that the local authorities did everything possible to prevent
any of the criminals from actually being punished, turning the
entire judicial process in these cases to a total farce. Instead
of serving as an important history lesson, like the trial of Jasenovac
concentration camp commander Dinko Sakic in Croatia, the Lithuanian
attitude toward their Nazi collaborators was one of understanding
and sympathy for the last people on earth
to deserve such treatment.
In view of all of the above, and given Rosenson's efforts to describe
Lithuania in a positive light, one can only wonder why a respected
religious Zionist educator would defend the truly-indefensible
behavior of a country which had the highest percentage of Jewish
victims in the Holocaust and is trying its hardest to erase or
at least minimize the memory of those crimes? The only possible
answer is that in recent years the Lithuanian government has allocated
enormous sums to try and improve its image in Jewish communities
the world over. Can it be that the year-long program on Lithuanian
Jewish history which culminates with a trip to Lithuania which
is organized by Rabbi Rosenson personally and sponsored by Efrata
Teachers College has been the recepient of Lithuanian government
largesse? I hope that the existence of this program and nothing
more explains why Efrata hosted the previous Lithuanian ambassador
to Israel (currently the Deputy Foreign Minister) despite the terrible
acccusations made at that time by
the Lithuanain government against Jewish anti-Nazi partisans.
I do not know the answer to this question and I would like Rabbi
Rosenson to explain. I can only hope that Rosenson's interview
was the result of ignorance rather than funding , but something
is very seriously wrong when a respected Zionist religious educational
leader publically provides patently false information to defend
those who are, in my opinion, in the process of inflicting serious
damage on the interests of the Jewish people and the memory of
the Holocaust.
israelnationalnews.com
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