The
organisers of a conference this week on Lithuanian-Jewish
relations have hit back at claims that critics of the
Lithuanian government were not invited because it was
jointly sponsored by the country's Foreign Ministry.
Francois Guesnet, who teaches modern Jewish history at University College London,
said: "To suggest that critics of the Lithuanian government were excluded is not correct.
Participants were chosen for their expertise, not on
whether they were critical or not of the government."
The claims of exclusion were
made in a petition handed to the Lithuanian embassy in
London on Monday by Danny Ben-Moshe, an associate professor
at Victoria University, Australia; MP Denis MacShane;
and Danny Stone, director of the All-Parliamentary Committee
Against Antisemitism Foundation.
The petition attacked "an
increasingly energetic campaign to stop the full truth
about the Holocaust" being discussed in Lithuania.
It also criticised the Lithuanians
over the threatened war crimes investigation of Jewish
wartime partisans.
And the failure to punish
any Lithuanian implicated in Nazi war crimes for 20 years;
a court ruling last year which refused to outlaw the
swastika as a Nazi symbol; and the government's "double genocide" campaign seeking to put European recognition of Soviet crimes on a par with
those of the Nazis. On Tuesday, a Board of Deputies delegation
met Lithuanian Ambassador Oskaras Jusys to discuss antisemitism
and other matters, including the Lithuanian parliament's
decision to postpone a $50 million restitution payment
to the Lithuanian Jewish community.
Board joint vice-president
Paul Edlin described the meeting as "productive," and said that the Lithuanians recognised that the Shoah was much worse than
the Soviet occupation.
The ambassador, he said, had
also pledged Lithuania's opposition to any demonisation
of Israel or the Jewish people at the forthcoming United
Nations Durban anniversary conference on human rights.
thejc.com
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