SYDNEY,
Australia (JTA) -- A petition blasted the Lithuanian
government's celebrations of the 70th anniversary of
the Lithuanian Provisional Government, which began “the
barbaric campaign of humiliation, harm, plunder and murder”
of Jews in 1941.
The 24 signatories to the petition, which was sent Thursday to Lithuanian parliamentarians,
feature a group of eminent Jews from Europe, Israel,
North America and Australia. They include professors,
rabbis, journalists, authors, lawyers, representatives
of Holocaust museums, Holocaust survivors and a British
parliamentarian.
The petition slams the government’s
engagement in a “double genocide” campaign that the petitioners
believe “distorts, obfuscates and undermines” the Holocaust
and “negates the lessons of history of both the Nazi
and communist eras.”
June 23, 1941, it states,
“marked the beginning of the end of more than six centuries
of Jewish life in Lithuania and the brutal destruction
by genocide of a people so culturally and religiously
rich that they made the city Vilna renowned as the Jerusalem
of Lithuania.”
The petitioners, all of Lithuanian
descent, include the United Kingdom's Lord Greville Janner;
Rabbi Moses Birnbaum of New York; British broadcaster
Michael Freedland; Dr. Efraim Zuroff of the Simon Wiesenthal
Center in Jerusalem; and Danny Ben-Moshe, an associate
professor at Victoria University in Australia.
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