Vilnius is not a Worthy Cultural Capital of Europe

Andrew Baker denounces the European Union member Lithuania for not facing its own history, endangering the survival of Jewish communities and tolerating neo-Nazis.

By: RABBI ANDREW BAKER

Andrew Baker. Picture by Peter Himsel

The European Union has designated Vilnius, Lithuania as the European Capital of Culture for next year. It doesn’t deserve the recognition.

To be sure it is a charming city with a beautiful Old Town and a venerable history. Workers are busy restoring churches and palaces, and the first-time visitor is likely to be smitten by the postcard perfect scenes. What that visitor may not know is that Lithuania is systematically rejecting a major element of its cultural heritage and reflecting a level of intolerance unacceptable for a new member of the EU.

Jews have lived in Lithuania for a millennium, and Vilnius—or Vilna, as it was also known—was a center of Jewish life and scholarship. In the 18th century it boasted so many yeshivas and prominent rabbis that it was known as “the Jerusalem of Lithuania.” By the 20th century a third of the city’s population was Jewish, and it was a world center of Yiddish culture and scholarship.

The Holocaust ended all that. Over 200,000 Jews—over 90 percent of the population—were killed by the Nazis, with the assistance of Lithuanian collaborators.

Today there is a small but reviving Jewish community in Lithuania, and it is seeking the return of former Jewish communal property as a means of restoring and preserving Jewish heritage sites and supporting its own limited religious and cultural needs. It has sought to follow the same path as that taken by Jewish communities in neighboring countries such as Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, where community property restitution was implemented years ago.

In Prague the restored Jewish quarter with its eight synagogues is a magnet for tourists and the center of Jewish activity. In Poland the Krakow neighborhood known as Kazimerz hosts an annual Jewish Cultural Festival that brings 25,000 people together for a week of concerts, films and lectures that display the country’s rich Jewish legacy. In Slovakia a government-endowed foundation—a partial settlement for looted Jewish assets during the Holocaust—distributes funds to aid the elderly and restore cemeteries and synagogues. But none of this is happening in Lithuania.

Instead, the Lithuanian government has sought every excuse to delay an agreement on communal property restitution. It has been “negotiating” continuously for over six years, with only a hiatus taken four years ago during Parliamentary elections. Conventional wisdom at the time maintained that it was too controversial an issue for an election year. New elections will take place this fall, so the present government just needs to push it down the road for a few more months. In the meantime former Jewish properties are privatized and the community lacks even the most basic support for education and welfare.

Vilna’s historic Jewish cemetery was hundreds of years old, but that mattered little to the Russians and Soviets. Early in the 20th century the Tsar’s army built a military fort on the site, and in the 1970s the Soviets built a sports palace in its place. Lithuania’s post-Communist leadership promised that no graves would be desecrated under their watch, but those promises proved hollow. The land was privatized and sold to developers and, despite regulations to the contrary, city permits were issued to allow the construction of luxury apartments. It was rumored that the Mayor of Vilnius had a major stake in the development. In September 2007 the President of Lithuania publicly promised that the construction would stop. It still continues.

The tragic history of the Holocaust was not widely known inside Lithuania. The country itself was annexed by the Soviet Union even before World War II had ended, and there was no possibility of any critical, objective examination of Lithuania’s Holocaust history until it regained its freedom in 1991. A presidential decree created an international historical commission in 1998 to report on both the Nazi and Soviet occupations. Among its prominent members was Professor Yitzak Arad, the founding director of Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Museum and Archives. Arad was born in Lithuania; his family was killed by the Nazis; and as a teenager he fled into the forests and joined the Soviet Partisans. When the war ended he left for Palestine. Sixty years later a Lithuanian newspaper translated excerpts from his diary, which described the Partisans’ battles with Germans and with Lithuanian collaborators. Last year the Lithuanian General Prosecutor decided this was prima face evidence that Arad might be guilty of war crimes and opened an investigation. The historical commission has published several scholarly works which detail the role of Lithuanians in the Holocaust. But the actions of the Prosecutor make a mockery of these findings.

In March Lithuania celebrated its independence day from the Soviet Union. Among those who marked the event were several hundred neo-Nazis and skinheads who paraded along Gedimino Avenue past the Parliament and the Prime Minister’s office waving flags with a Lithuanian swastika and shouting “Juden Raus.” To be sure this was not the first neo-Nazi rally in Eastern Europe. In November a similar group organized a march in Prague with the provocative goal of walking through the city’s Jewish quarter. But in Prague the neo-Nazis were greeted by thousands of counter-demonstrators and nearly all the country’s political leaders, making clear to them that their sentiments were not welcome. In Vilnius where incitement to ethnic hatred is a crime, police provided the marchers with an escort but no arrests. No one confronted them. The President voiced his criticism…ten days later.

Twisting Holocaust memory, desecrating cemeteries, ignoring antisemitism, and refusing to return communal property—surely this is not the best cultural capital Europe can offer.

Rabbi Andrew Baker is the American Jewish Committee’s Director of International Jewish Affairs.