Lithuania does not maintain its Holocaust narrative alone.

It is helped by Jewish institutions willing to behave as if the evidentiary environment around Lithuania does not exist. But that environment does exist, and it has existed for decades.

I have published it. Efraim Zuroff has published it. The Simon Wiesenthal Center has published it. Rūta Vanagaitė has published it. Christoph Dieckmann has published it. Saulius Sužiedėlis has published it. Yad Vashem has published it. Silvia Foti has published it. Grant Gochin has published it. Michael Kretzmer has published it. Dillon Hosier has published it. Congressman Brad Sherman has put part of it into official correspondence. The Board of Rabbis has written to Lithuania directly.

So the question is no longer whether the record is available. The question is how much critical effort a major Jewish institution must expend to pretend that nothing is going on in the environment.

No one asks about Fridman, Sherman, the Board of Rabbis, Foti, Gochin, Levin, Zuroff, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Vanagaitė, Dieckmann, Sužiedėlis, Yad Vashem, Kretzmer, Hosier, Brazaitis, Noreika, or Ramanauskas.

That level of omission does not happen by accident. It takes work. It takes discipline. It takes a conscious decision to look past this many names, this many documents, this many warnings, and still provide a warm, laudatory environment for Lithuanian politicians.

In “The Museum, the Prosecution, and AJC”, I described one example of that effort. A Lithuanian state presentation was given a respectful Jewish setting even though the surrounding record already supplied more than enough reason for challenge. That was not an oversight. It was a choice. The room was arranged to flatter, not to test.

This is the mechanism.

A Lithuanian politician arrives at a Jewish event. The language is familiar. Friendship. Shared memory. Heritage. Dialogue. The official is treated as a custodian of remembrance rather than as a representative of a state that has spent decades managing, narrowing, and falsifying the record of its own Holocaust history. The audience is asked to admire the performance and ignore the file.

AJC did not create Lithuania’s fraud. Lithuania created it. But AJC helped create the setting in which the fraud could appear untouched by controversy. Lithuania does not always need to win the argument. Often it needs only a Jewish stage on which the argument is never allowed to begin.

Realpolitik can justify engagement. States engage states. Jewish organizations can support an Israel-Lithuania relationship if they believe that serves Israeli interests. Fine. Advocate for the relationship. But do not provide cover for Holocaust revisionists. Do not give them a platform to lie to Jews. Do not give them a platform to cleanse themselves before Jewish audiences, supported by Jewish donors.

What would an honest stage require?

It would require asking why Lithuania still preserves honor for Jonas Noreika after the documentary record was exposed in the book by his own granddaughter, Silvia Foti, Storm in the Land of Rain and in her subsequent public writing, including “I Told the Truth. Lithuania Didn’t Care.”.

It would require asking why Lithuania’s Genocide and Resistance Research Centre fabricated an American Congressional “exoneration” of Juozas Brazaitis and then refused to correct the record after Congressman Brad Sherman said plainly that no such exoneration existed in these letters, as documented in “US Congress Exposes Lithuania’s Holocaust Fraud”.

It would require asking why Lithuania has brought a criminal case against Artur Fridman for Holocaust-related speech at his grandfather’s grave while continuing to protect the national status of men whose records remain contested, as discussed in “Why Lithuania Prosecutes a Jew for May 9” and in “The Indictment That Put Lithuania on Trial”.

It would require asking why the Board of Rabbis and years of published documentation have not altered the behavior of the Lithuanian state.

And it would require asking why Jewish institutions continue to behave as though none of this is material.

That is what makes the recent episode so reprehensible. Lithuania approved a 157-measure antisemitism plan, and its foreign minister then discussed that plan with AJC leadership, as Grant Gochin addressed in “To Jewish Leaders: Read Before You Go”. The people who hero-worship the murderers of our families are to stand before us and tell us how they will abate antisemitism. That is degrading to Jews. It is an insult to Holocaust victims. It makes AJC look foolish. It makes us look foolish.

There is now an even uglier layer to the fraud. In “Unknown Rescuers, Unreliable Custodians”, Gochin identifies the next move. The same custodians who will not tell the truth about known perpetrators are now prepared to enlarge the moral balance sheet with newly invented rescuers. When Lithuania cannot clear the record of known perpetrators, it turns to invented invisible rescuers. If it cannot cleanse the archive of guilt, it will create an archive of invented invisible virtue. They will not stabilize the record of guilt. They will inflate the record of virtue. They will not tell the truth about Lithuania’s Holocaust record. They will manufacture a compensating legend.

That is not scholarship. It is not memory. It is not even ordinary damage control. It is narrative manufacture by people who have already shown that they cannot be trusted with the existing archive.

At that point the question stops being polite. Who does AJC work for in that moment? Jewish truth? Jewish memory? Jewish dignity? Or the diplomatic needs of Lithuanian officials who require Jewish validation precisely because the historical record does not validate them?

Set AJC against the published field and the picture is stark. On one side stand Levin, Zuroff, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Vanagaitė, Dieckmann, Sužiedėlis, Yad Vashem, Foti, Gochin, Kretzmer, Hosier, Sherman, and the Board of Rabbis. On the other stands AJC, nearly alone, behaving as if the environment can be ignored.

This is not neutrality. It is not careful diplomacy. It is not bridge-building. It is assistance.

AJC is an advocacy organization. Then advocate. Advocate for Jews. Advocate for Israel’s interests. Advocate for relations with Lithuania if you must. But do not advocate for Holocaust revisionists by giving them a platform to cleanse themselves before Jewish audiences.

The tragedy is that the record is no longer obscure. No one can honestly say the warnings were too faint or the evidence too hard to find. The work has been done in public. The names are public. The documents are public. The contradictions are public. Zuroff has published it. The Simon Wiesenthal Center has published it. Vanagaitė has published it. Dieckmann has published it. Sužiedėlis has published it. Yad Vashem has published it. Foti has published it. Gochin has published it. Kretzmer has published it. Hosier has published it. Sherman has put part of it into official correspondence. The Board of Rabbis has written to Lithuania directly.

This is not a case of hidden evidence. It is a case of managed indifference.

Silence under those conditions is not neutrality. It is assistance.

To host without asking is to assist. To praise without testing is to assist. To pose for photographs while the documentary environment is treated as irrelevant is to assist. To behave as though Lithuania’s representatives arrive uncontaminated by the record of their own state institutions is to assist.

Those who facilitate Lithuania’s lies about its Holocaust record would be anathema to the murdered Jews of Lithuania. They would not be seen as friends of memory. They would be seen as helpers in its desecration.

Lithuania cannot manufacture Jewish legitimacy at home. It imports it. It imports it from Jewish institutions abroad willing to suspend scrutiny for the length of an event, the length of a reception, the length of a diplomatic season.

That is not dialogue. It is supply.

And the people being supplied are not the dead Jews whose names are invoked in these rooms. The people being supplied are the living officials who need Jewish endorsement while they evade the record.

There is a way to close this. AJC should notify its constituency, in writing, that the appearance of any Lithuanian official carries unresolved controversy, and that the engagement is limited to state-to-state business, not to Jewish-Lithuanian relations. It should demand, in writing and in public, that as a condition of continued engagement Lithuania begin to tell the truth about its Holocaust record and respond in substance to the outstanding letters from Congress and the Board of Rabbis. AJC may acknowledge that Lithuania has chosen to honor the murderers of Jews as a matter of internal national ideology. That choice is Lithuania’s to make. But it forecloses the opportunity for AJC, or any other Jewish organization, to serve as a facilitator between Lithuania and the Jewish world. A state that honors the men who murdered Jews does not get to use Jews to clean its reputation.

So on behalf of those murdered Jews, we respectfully beg AJC: stop doing this.

Stand up for Jews, not for antisemites.

Times of Israel blogs

Grant Arthur Gochin: https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/author/grant-arthur-gochin/

Silvia Foti: https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/author/silvia-foti/

Michael Kretzmer: https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/author/michael-kretzmer/

Eugene J. Levin: https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/author/eugene-j-levin/

Dillon Hosier: https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/author/dillon-hosier/

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)