A number of Jewish and Lithuanian dignitaries gathered on Sunday in the
northwestern Lithuanian town of Plunge for the dedication of a memorial wall for
the more than 2,200 Jews from the town who were murdered by the Nazis in
1941.
The monument, built in the nearby village of Kausenai from the
bricks of the ruined Plunge synagogue, was vandalized last week and was badly
chipped and scratched, but it was decided to go ahead with the ceremony anyway
and for the damage to be left as it was.
RELATED:Lithuanian PM visits remains of Vilnius Great SynagogueJewish Vilnius: A city concealed, a city revealed Lithuanian Deputy Minister for
Foreign Affairs and former ambassador to Israel Asta Skaisgiryte-Liauskiene was
in attendance as was Jakob Bunka, the only remaining Jewish resident of Plunge.
Abel Levitt, an Israeli of Lithuanian origin who initiated the construction of
the memorial, was also at the dedication service along with a number of people
from the Jewish community of Vilnius.
Dr. Efraim Zuroff, the Simon
Wiesenthal Center’s Israel director, said that while he was happy that the
dedication had taken place, the vandalism is a sign of deep-seated resentment in
Lithuania at being reminded of Lithuanian complicity in the murder of Jews
during the Holocaust.
The memorial for the Ponary massacres near Vilnius
was also desecrated last week, with swastikas and offensive slogans daubed on
the monuments. One of them bore the words “Hitler was right” in Russian, while
the central memorial was spray painted with a picture of a penis, a phrase about
oral sex and the words “128 million,” referring to the sum of money (in
Lithuanian litas, $52 million) approved by the Lithuanian government in June for
the compensation of Jewish property lost during the
Holocaust.
Approximately 100,000 people, including 70,000 Jews, were
murdered in the village of Paneriai between 1941 and 1944.
In a
statement, the Simon Wiesenthal Center pointed to a recent international
conference sponsored by the Lithuanian government at which violence launched by
Lithuanians against Jews in at least 40 incidents before the arrival of Nazi
troops in 1941 was denied.
“If as was claimed at the recent historical
conference held at the Seimas [Lithuanian parliament], Jewish historians…
purposely lied about the scope of Lithuanian criminality during the Shoah, such
desecrations of Holocaust memorials become almost understandable,” said
Zuroff.
“The ongoing government-sponsored and -financed distortion,
minimization and downplaying of the critical role played by Lithuanian Nazi
collaborators in Holocaust crimes has created an anti-Semitic atmosphere in
which slogans such as “Hitler was right” seem natural.”
Also last week, a
synagogue in Moscow was firebombed, causing minor damage and no injuries. The
president of the Russian Jewish Congress, Yury Kanner, told the Russian news
agency Interfax that the attack had been carefully planned. “The synagogue is in
a place far away from metro stations and public transport stops. Those people
knowingly chose the place and arrived there at night, bringing along incendiary
bottles,” he said.
It has been speculated that the attack was linked to
the life sentences handed down by a Moscow court last week to five Russian
neo-Nazis, although Kanner said he did not think the two should be linked or
that it was evidence of growing anti-Semitism.