Letter
calls on country to reverse court decision declaring
the swastika part of the country’s “historic legacy.”
LONDON – Parliamentarians and scholars are calling on
Lithuania to combat anti-Semitism and distortion of
the Holocaust as its London embassy begins a series
of Jewish cultural events this week.
A delegation led by MP Denis Mac- Shane and Lord Greville Janner, both leading
campaigners in the UK against anti-Semitism, handed in
a letter to the embassy on Monday. It was signed by 20
MPs and academics, and called on Lithuania to crack down
on anti-Semitism and reverse a court decision declaring
the swastika part of the country’s “historic legacy,”
thereby allowing its use by anti-Semites at political
rallies.
The letter also highlights that while the Lithuanian government is sponsoring
events abroad that promote Jewish life, it is engaged
in an increasingly energetic campaign to stop the full
the truth about the Holocaust and events of the Second
World War from being discussed.
It expresses concern about “the irony of the Lithuanian Embassy in London hosting
an exhibition about pre-World War Two Jewish life, titled
‘The Sounds of Silence,’ when debate about the Holocaust
is being silenced and distorted in Lithuania.”
The signatories call on the
government in Vilnius to tackle anti-Semitism in the
media, following headlines accusing “the Jews” of expropriating
money from the country, and castigate it for failing
to investigate and prosecute those responsible for anti-Semitic
acts.
Last year, a pig’s head was
left outside the Kaunas synagogue during a Sabbath service.
Lithuania is at the forefront
of a right-wing European campaign saying that the Holocaust
was no different from the crimes of communism. The signatories
said this “double genocide” campaign was aimed at devaluing
the centrality of the Holocaust and was supported by
“anti-Jewish political groups in the Middle East and
other anti-Semitic politicians.”
The letter also accused the
country of failing to prosecute a single Lithuanian Nazi
war criminal since 1991 while instead threatening war
crime prosecutions against Lithuanian Jewish resistance
fighters who fought the Nazis.
“Sadly, Lithuania is not alone
in East European and Baltic states, where nationalist
populist politicians have made anti-Jewish themes part
of contemporary political discourse,” said MacShane,
former minister for Europe and former chairman of the
All-Party Parliamentary Enquiry into Anti-Semitism.
“In Poland, politicians like
Michal Kaminski, who recently resigned as chairman of
the Conservatives for European Reform group in the European
Parliament because he said it was too extremist, are
notorious for refusing the apologize for attacks on Jews
by Poles in wartime Poland,” MacShane said. “In Hungary,
the openly anti-Semitic Jobbik Party got 15 percent of
votes in the last election.”
The letter called on the Lithuanian
government to take a number of steps to correct the situation
and help repair Jewish-Lithuanian relations. This included
ending without delay the pretrial “war crime” investigations
against Jewish resistance fighters and recognizing the
role that Lithuanian organizations played in the mass
murder of Lithuanian Jewry.
“The Jewish community in Lithuania
is being humiliated and the atmosphere of free speech
eroded. Jewish history, particularly that of the Holocaust,
is being untruthfully rewritten, and anti- Semitism is
espoused,” said British academic Danny Ben-Moshe, a signatory
of the letter.
“The Lithuanian government
may think they can have it both ways – intimidating Jewish
life in Lithuanian while maintaining a philo-Semitic
image elsewhere – but this letter puts them on notice
that the charade is over,” Ben-Moshe said. “As the Lithuanian
government seeks to export their policies across the
EU, it is clear that this is not just a Jewish concern,
but a concern for all those who cherish freedom of debate
and oppose ultra- Nationalism.”
Other signatories of the letter
included Efraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal
Center’s Jerusalem office; Joseph Melamed, chairman of
the Association of Lithuanian Jews in Israel; Uri Chanoch,
a board member of the Claims Conference; and descendents
of Lithuanian Jews killed in the Holocaust. jpost.com
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