It
was supposed to be an evening of celebration and remembrance
of the Jews of the Vilna Ghetto. But by hosting the Lithuanian
foreign minister as “guest of honor” at a concert of
Yiddish songs, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research
has instead angered some Holocaust survivors and their
advocates.
Audronius Ažubalis, the foreign minister, will attend the New York event, called
“The Vilna Ghetto Experience,” on September 22. The invitation
— issued as YIVO conducts sensitive negotiations with
Lithuania about the return of archives it lost control
of during World War II — has rekindled a long-simmering
debate about Lithuanian complicity in the Holocaust and
what is perceived by some as a failure to achieve an
adequate agreement on restitution of Jewish property.
“It is very painful that YIVO would make such an error,” said Dovid Katz, a former
professor of Yiddish language, literature and culture
at Vilnius University and author of defendinghistory.com,
a website that is critical of the Lithuanian government.
“This is not the moment to have this guest of honor.”
Almost all of Lithuania’s
approximately 210,000 Jews, many of them living in Vilna,
perished during World War II. Many were killed by Lithuanian
paramilitary units working under the Nazis.
Lithuania has been among the
countries that have been slowest to pay restitution for
Jewish communal properties, such as schools and synagogues,
which were seized during the war. After almost 10 years
of wrangling, it agreed in July to pay 38 million Euros,
then the equivalent of $53 million, over the next decade.
But this is substantially less than the properties are
believed to have been worth.
Private property claims have
also been extremely difficult because the Lithuanian
government restricted claims to people with current Lithuanian
citizenship. A recent and controversial proposal in the
Lithuanian parliament to allow dual Lithuanian citizenship
could pave the way for more claims.
In discussing this citizenship
law last year, Ažubalis reportedly told colleagues in
a closed-door meeting that “Jews of Lithuanian descent”
were the driving force behind the proposal so they could
“regain most easily their property in Lithuania.” His
statement was published in the Vilnius daily, Lietuvos
Rytas, and translated on a Lithuanian-American website,
Litchat. According to Alfa.lt, a Lithuanian-based news
site, the foreign ministry responded within days that
the minister’s words had been misrepresented.
Efraim Zuroff, director of
the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Jerusalem office, said
the comment was a “disgustingly anti-Semitic remark”
and that he would write to YIVO protesting the invitation
to the minister.
Zuroff said Ažubalis’s comment
was in line with broader Lithuanian attempts to downplay
the Holocaust and Lithuanian complicity in the genocide
while emphasizing Lithuanian suffering under the Soviet
Union, which occupied Lithuania twice during the war.
Zuroff said Lithuania has
repeatedly hampered attempts to prosecute suspected Lithuanian
war criminals. Meanwhile, it has sought to interrogate
a handful of Holocaust survivors who fought as anti-Nazi
partisans. They include Israeli historian Yitzhak Arad,
a former director of Yad Vashem, whom Lithuania accused
of working for the Soviet secret police, and whom it
attempted to extradite from Israel to face questions
about alleged war crimes. Israel denied the request.
Lithuania ought “not to be
honored but censured and criticized harshly for what’s
going on there,” Zuroff said.
YIVO’s executive director
and CEO Jonathan Brent said in a September 2 interview
with the Forward that he would investigate the remarks
allegedly made by the Lithuanian foreign minister. In
a later e-mail, he said he would discuss the issue with
the Lithuanian consul general, Valdemaras Sarapinas,
in a meeting on September 8.
Brent said the concert was
co-sponsored by the Lithuanian consulate. It was the
consulate, he said, that had suggested that the foreign
minister, who would be in New York for the U. N. General
Assembly, “would be interested in attending.” He added
that the “guest of honor” title was a formality and should
not to be interpreted as YIVO literally honoring him.
“In fact,” Brent said, “I
believe the government of Lithuania is honoring us by
acknowledging the suffering of Jewish people by wishing
to participate in an evening where the experience of
the Holocaust is going to be discussed and expressed
in songs and poetry.”
The row over the concert has
been complicated by ongoing negotiations between YIVO
and the Lithuanian government over the fate of a large
portion of YIVO’s archive, which is held in Lithuania.
YIVO was founded in Vilna,
then a part of Poland, in 1925, as a center for graduate
studies of Yiddish literature, language, culture and
sociology. “YIVO was the Oxford of East European Jewry,”
said David Fishman, professor of Jewish history at the
New York-based Jewish Theological Seminary.
After the Nazis occupied Lithuania,
in 1941, about 70% of YIVO’s library and archive was
either “recycled” or burned, Fishman said. After the
war, about two-thirds of the remaining materials were
rescued and shipped to New York. About one-third remained
in Lithuania.
Since 1990, successive YIVO
directors have fought a seemingly intractable battle
with Lithuanian authorities to bring the rest of the
collection to America. In the late 1990s, the Lithuanian
government agreed to ship a portion of the archive to
New York for copying and return. But according to Allan
Nadler, who was YIVO’s director of research then, the
institute had to secretly pay to copy its own materials.
“Officially, there was a protocol
signed between YIVO and the Lithuanian government,” Nadler
said. “But under the table there was cash given in order
to secure the agreement.“ Nadler said several New York
philanthropists came up with the money — “more than tens
of thousands of dollars” — in return for several hundred
boxes of material. Nadler estimated that the documents
represented, at most, about 15% of the archive held in
Lithuania.
Brent, who has been negotiating
with the Lithuanians for years, believes he may be close
to a different solution. He and the Lithuanian government
have discussed establishing a room, to be named after
YIVO, in the Lithuanian National Library where the documents
would be accessible to scholars.
“The YIVO board must vote
on this, and we are now conducting a full review of whether
the Lithuanian government has demonstrated sufficient
credibility as a partner in good faith to warrant this
commitment from YIVO,” Brent wrote in a September 6 e-mail
to The Forward.
Nadler called the potential
deal “pathetic” and “insulting.”
“We’ve been handling with
them for two decades now,” Nadler said, using the Yiddish
for negotiating, “and so what? We get a sign on a room?”
Elan Steinberg, vice president
of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors, said:
“I don’t know if this is the case here, but historically
the effort to divide Jews, to find on the part of our
adversaries so-called good Jews to which they can reap
the benefit at the lowest price, as opposed to bad Jews
who stand on principle is an old historical tactic.”
Both Nadler and Steinberg
criticized the invitation of Ažubalis to the concert.
Brent defended the potential
deal to secure access to the YIVO archive as necessary
to break the cycle of “mutual anger, bitterness, resentment,
hostility, acrimony and accusations” that have characterized
the past 20 years. Attitudes toward the Holocaust in
Lithuania are changing, he said.
Lithuania has a complex past
when it comes to World War II and its aftermath. The
Nazis were viewed by many Lithuanians as liberators when
they invaded in 1941, one year after the Red Army had
occupied their country, Nadler said. Lithuanian nationalists
equated — and in small part continue to equate — Jews
with Communism, he and others said. At the end of the
war, the Russians once again occupied the country and
then absorbed it into the Soviet Union, which it remained
part of until 1991. Several scholars described the country
as one still coming to terms with its past in a part
of Europe where tens of millions of people died under
both Nazism and Communism.
“Clearly there has been progress,”
said Rabbi Andrew Baker, director of international affairs
for the American Jewish Committee, regarding Lithuanian
attitudes toward the Holocaust, “but there have been
a lot of painful episodes along the way.”
Baker was a key negotiator
in the communal property restitution agreement with the
Lithuanian government and has dealt with Ažubalis on
a number of occasions. He said he believed the minister’s
denial of anti-Semitism. “I think on critical issues
he’s been helpful and supportive,” Baker said. “So I
give him the benefit of the doubt.”
Simon Gurevicius, executive
director of the Lithuanian Jewish community, said both
YIVO and its critics are right. On the one hand, Lithuania
must be censured for its wartime record and for its nationalistic
and, at times, anti-Semitic behavior. On the other hand,
Lithuanian society must be engaged and educated about
the Holocaust.
“We need to find a balance
between seeing bad things and giving an opportunity to
Lithuanian society to correct its mistakes,” Gurevicius
said.
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