The
Baltic nations have embarked on a state-financed international
initiative which seeks to cover up their role in the
Holocaust by falsely equating Nazism with Communism,
the founder of the Yiddish program at Vilnius University
said this week.
"There is a state-sponsored genocide industry at work which seeks to mitigate
the Holocaust and replace it with a model of two equal
genocides," said Professor Dovid Katz in an interview with The Jerusalem Post.
The remarks came amid a recent
strain in relations between Israel and Lithuania over
the latter's investigations of Jewish Holocaust survivors,
including a former Yad Vashem chairman, over their wartime
activities as partisans.
The New York-born Katz, who
has been based in Lithuania for the past decade, said
this "bogus distortion of history," which had anti-Semitic roots, needed to be fought before it gained strength.
"We are overwhelmed
by a state-financed genocide industry which seeks both
locally and internationally to mitigate and trivialize
the local Baltic involvement in the Holocaust in order
to rewrite their history without the stain of the Holocaust," he said. To this end, the Baltic states have been spearheading an international
effort, dubbed the "Prague Declaration," to have Nazi and Soviet crimes declared equal by the EU, Katz said.
"They think that
they are fixing their country's Holocaust problem not
by coming clean and moving onward but by obfuscating
the actual history with this bogus new model of two equal
genocides," he said.
He noted that state-sponsored
bodies such as the International Commission for the Evaluation
of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes
in Lithuania were actively promoting this "historical rewrite," though without denying the mass murder of the Jews. "The catchword is equal," he said.
During the Holocaust, most
of the Jews of Lithuania were murdered by local citizens.
The "Order Police" began to massacre Jews as soon as the Soviets left in 1941 - before the German
occupation. Out of a prewar population of 220,000, only
a few thousand Jews survived the war in Lithuania, representing
the largest percentage of Jews murdered in one country
during the Holocaust.
The Lithuanian capital - a
one-time preeminent center for rabbinical studies dating
back to the 16th century - is today home to about 5,000
Jews.
"There is no question
that the greatest threat to the Holocaust narrative today
is not Holocaust denial but rather Holocaust distortion,
which is currently rampant in post-Communist eastern
Europe, especially the Baltics," said Efraim Zuroff, chief Nazi hunter of the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal
Center.
"This is a major
focus of the Baltic states' foreign policy objectives," he said.
Zuroff noted that the problem
was largely under the radar and little known to people
in the field of Holocaust education.
Yad Vashem spokeswoman Estee
Yaari said Monday that the Holocaust distortion in a
number of countries was a "worrying trend" that had to be combated.
She added that Israel's Holocaust
Memorial had in 2007 suspended its participation in the
state-sponsored Lithuanian commission on the Holocaust,
although it continued to work with Holocaust educators
from Lithuania to counter this phenemenom.
Earlier this year, Yad Vashem
said it was increasingly concerned over growing Holocaust
revisionism and anti-Semitism in Lithuania.
jpost.com
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