Questions for AJC and B’nai B’rith |
I write in good faith, as a member of the community these organizations serve, with questions I hope their leadership will treat seriously.
The American Jewish Committee’s former long-serving CEO David Harris received the Cross of the Knight of the Order for Merits to Lithuania in 2021. AJC’s Director of International Jewish Affairs, Rabbi Andrew Baker, received the Officer’s Cross of Merit in 2006 and the Lithuanian Diplomacy Star in 2012. B’nai B’rith International’s chief executive, Daniel S. Mariaschin, has received a Lithuanian state decoration. Grant Gochin has written on these honors with wit in Size Matters.
Lithuanian state honors are issued under a single body of state-awards law. The register that honors Mr. Harris, Rabbi Baker, and Mr. Mariaschin also carries honors conferred on figures whose Holocaust records have been independently documented. Is this the register in which these recipients wish their names to remain?
The Good Will Foundation
Rabbi Baker also co-chairs the Good Will Foundation, which administers Lithuania’s restitution payments for the confiscated immovable property of Lithuania’s pre-war Jewish religious communities. The Foundation receives approximately 3.6 million euros annually. Its declared mission states that funds are to be distributed “in a transparent, fair and effective manner.” These are not ordinary foundation funds. They are the residue of annihilation. 220,000 Lithuanian Jews were murdered, most by their own neighbors. Money of this provenance carries an obligation to the murdered that ordinary philanthropic money does not.
Rabbi Sholom Ber Krinsky, the Chabad rabbi who has served Vilnius for more than thirty years, has publicly and repeatedly requested detailed disclosure of the Foundation’s receipts and expenditures. His published record documents year after year in which his religious school received nothing while grants were directed outside Lithuania with limited public accounting. He is not the only party to have asked. Full transparency has not been provided.
Lithuania’s only first place
To our knowledge, Lithuania has never finished first in the world on any benchmark by which modern states are ordinarily measured. Not in science, medicine, technology, education, or living standards. In the entire history of its existence as an independent state, Lithuania has achieved exactly one global first: the highest Jewish murder rate of the Holocaust. 96.4%. Higher than Germany. Higher than Poland. 220,000 Jews murdered, most by Lithuanians. Not a single Lithuanian has been punished for the murder of a single Jew since 1990.
The flagship cultural institution of this state, formerly called the Museum of Genocide Victims, commemorates Soviet deportations. The murder of 220,000 Jews received no dedicated exhibition space until 2011. The building’s exterior wall carries a memorial to Jonas Noreika, a documented participant in the Holocaust, and Noreika is not the only such figure honored by contemporary Lithuania. Tablet Magazine described the institution as “Lithuania’s Museum of Holocaust Denial.” In Lithuania, participation in the murder of Jews has not been an impediment to honors.
On January 21, 2026, Lithuania adopted a 157-point Action Plan for Combating Antisemitism. 157 is a number chosen because it sounds comprehensive. The plan revokes no honor. It retracts no fabrication. It does not submit Lithuania’s state Holocaust-research body to independent foreign review. It does not address the Fridman prosecution.
Lithuania’s second marketing number is the “over 900” Lithuanians recognized by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations. Lithuanian diplomats present it with pride. They do not present it as a percentage. Out of a wartime population of roughly 2.5 million, 900 Righteous works out to 0.04%. The silent remainder includes an estimated 30,000 documented perpetrators. Congressman Brad Sherman has written three letters documenting one specific Lithuanian fabrication. Lithuania has not answered any of them. Seven years of silence toward a sitting United States Congressman.
Artur Fridman is a Jewish citizen of a NATO member state under criminal prosecution for Holocaust speech. Case No. 02-2-00512-24. The prosecution rests on conclusions issued by Lithuania’s state historical research body.
Lithuania’s engagement with AJC and B’nai B’rith is cyclical, not episodic. A new medal. A new action plan. A new round of briefings. Between cycles, Lithuania does not answer the letters and inquiries that accumulate — not from a sitting United States Congressman writing across fourteen years, not from the Board of Rabbis of Southern California, not from ICAN, not from the Chairman of Yad Vashem. AJC and B’nai B’rith have been copied on many of those inquiries. Without continued engagement from American Jewry’s most prominent institutions, Lithuania has little defense before Jews. That dependence is the product of the relationship.
Germany, after the war, pursued an honest reckoning. Germany prosecuted perpetrators and continues to do so. Germany revised its textbooks. Germany’s relationships with Israel, with world Jewry, and with the United States are strong and durable because they rest on truth. Lithuania has chosen a different path — a path that requires perpetual reputational maintenance precisely because the foundation is not honest acknowledgment. A relationship built on truth is self-sustaining. A relationship built on narrative management is not. Jewish advocacy organizations should be the hardest, not the easiest, place for a state to source that maintenance.
The following questions are addressed to three individuals whose institutional posture on Lithuania is most directly consequential. Ted Deutch, Chief Executive Officer of the American Jewish Committee, who inherits from his predecessor the institutional relationship that David Harris’s acceptance of a Knight’s Cross helped formalize. Rabbi Andrew Baker, AJC’s Director of International Jewish Affairs, who holds multiple Lithuanian state decorations and co-chairs the Good Will Foundation. Daniel S. Mariaschin, Chief Executive of B’nai B’rith International, whose institutional biography lists Lithuanian state decoration among his honors.
What incentive, for a charitable organization? AJC and B’nai B’rith are charitable organizations, not sovereign actors. Their fiduciary duty runs to the Jewish communities whose donations and dues fund them. What Jewish interest is served by a representative of such an organization accepting, rather than declining, a state decoration from a government that continues to honor men who organized the murder of Jews as national heroes, that has never punished a single Lithuanian for the killing of a single Jew since 1990, and that is currently prosecuting a Jewish citizen for a Facebook post?
The question of repudiation. The honors were not conferred for personal achievement. They were conferred because of the positions these individuals hold in institutional American Jewry. The honors run, in substance, to the community those individuals represent. Continued retention can be read — intended or not — as implicit institutional endorsement of the conferring state’s current Holocaust posture. Is there a case for placing these honors in abeyance, or for their voluntary return, pending honest Lithuanian acknowledgment of the record? If the organizations have considered this and concluded otherwise, the community is entitled to the principled reasoning.
The pain is real. When an American Jewish advocacy organization appears in Lithuanian state communications alongside decorated representatives of a state whose national heroes include men who participated in the murder of Jews, the visible implication is that Jewish America has reviewed the record and is satisfied. For Jews who have reviewed the record and are not satisfied — for children of survivors, for grandchildren of the murdered — the photograph is not neutral. It is painful. I do not believe the pain is being produced deliberately. I believe the cost is invisible from the institutional vantage. I report it visible from the community’s.
Awareness is no longer optional. The scholarship is extensive and peer-reviewed. Yad Vashem’s Chairman has named Lithuania’s honored perpetrators from the floor of the Lithuanian parliament. The Fridman indictment is in court. A sixteen-page briefing with more than sixty source documents is on both organizations’ desks. Continuing to accept honors, attend briefings, or be photographed alongside Lithuanian officials without first engaging that record is a choice members and donors are entitled to evaluate on its merits.
On transparency. Mr. Deutch, Rabbi Baker: will AJC publish a complete annual ledger of the Good Will Foundation’s receipts and disbursements, with grant-by-grant rationales sufficient to satisfy any Lithuanian Jewish religious claimant who asks? The funds are not AJC’s. They are held in trust for beneficiaries who cannot answer because they were murdered. Rabbi Krinsky and other parties have asked. Full transparency has not been provided. I cannot think of a principled reason for withholding it. I would welcome one.
On the Fridman prosecution. Mr. Deutch, Mr. Mariaschin: what is the public position of your respective organizations on this prosecution? If a public statement exists, the community would welcome the citation. If none exists, the community is entitled to an explanation of why.
AJC Los Angeles is scheduled to host a presentation of the 157-point plan by representatives of the Lithuanian government on May 1, 2026. By its own text, that plan revokes no honor, retracts no fabrication, and does not address the Fridman prosecution. Platforming it for an American Jewish audience reads, to any informed observer, as substitution rather than remedy. How AJC reconciles such a platform with its stated mission of combating antisemitism is a question the community is entitled to see answered in public. Before the event proceeds, the community is entitled to see AJC publicly demand Lithuania’s substantive engagement with the unanswered letters — from Congressman Sherman, from the Board of Rabbis of Southern California, and from ICAN — or publicly withdraw. Because Lithuanian state communications have made public use of AJC representatives, the demand must itself be public.
What is already on the desk
On April 17, 2026, a sixteen-page letter to Congressman Sherman was made public, with more than sixty hyperlinked source documents. The cover note, To Jewish Leaders: Read Before You Go, is one page. Both were copied to the leadership of AJC, B’nai B’rith, and every other major American Jewish organization, and to the ambassadors of the United States, Israel, and Germany in Vilnius. The hyperlinks are live. Continued engagement with Lithuania on the current terms now carries a reputational risk owned by the NGOs that participate.
On behalf of the murdered
I have no quarrel with diplomatic engagement. Engagement is a legitimate instrument measured by the conduct it produces. On Lithuania, the conduct on record is fourteen years of unanswered Congressional correspondence, a 157-point plan that answers no documented concern, a Jewish citizen under criminal prosecution for Holocaust speech, and unresolved transparency at a restitution foundation. It should not be the role of American Jewish advocacy organizations to paper over Holocaust revisionism, intended or not.
I write for my murdered Baltic cousins, and for the murdered cousins of every Jew reading this. On their behalf: why are AJC and B’nai B’rith doing what they are doing?