On Friday, May 1, 2026, the American Jewish Committee (AJC) will host a delegation from the Government of Lithuania. According to AJC’s event notice, Lithuanian Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs and the Consul General of Lithuania are expected to attend, and the Lithuanian Ambassador to the United States may also appear. The stated purpose, in AJC’s own words, is for Lithuanian diplomats to present to a Jewish audience the Seimas’s January 2026 157-measure Action Plan on antisemitism and Jewish life.

AJC should not host this event in the form its invitation describes.

The issue is not whether Jewish organizations may ever meet Lithuanian officials. Of course they may. The issue is whether AJC should lend its institutional standing, its audience, and its name to a Lithuanian government presentation about combating antisemitism while that same state continues conduct that cuts directly against the plan’s stated purpose. Hosting of this kind is not neutral. It is credentialing. It gives a foreign government a Jewish institutional backdrop and invites the public to read that backdrop as legitimacy and perhaps approval.

That is why the Jewish community is entitled to the record before the event takes place.

This article is not the first due-diligence inquiry directed at AJC on Lithuania. It is the fifth. Four earlier due-diligence articles were published before this one because repeated private approaches produced no substantive answer. Questions were asked, documents were sent, and no meaningful response followed. Those prior articles should be read alongside this one: Questions for AJC and B’nai B’rith, AJC and Lithuania’s Fraud, To Jewish Leaders: Read Before You Go, and Are Jewish Organizations Doing Their Due Diligence.

Once these matters were published in the Times of Israel under AJC’s and B’nai B’rith’s names, they were in the Jewish public sphere. Organizations of this scale monitor press coverage, public references, and mentions affecting their institutional standing. Publication in a major Jewish outlet therefore places them on public notice whether or not they later choose to acknowledge direct emails.

And even if they were to deny receipt of any private communication, that would not solve the problem. Institutions that choose to honor, host, partner with, praise, or otherwise engage the Lithuanian state on Holocaust-memory issues are bound by due diligence whether or not they answer the person raising the record. Public notice is notice. Continued engagement after public notice is choice.

What AJC Is Being Asked to Do

AJC is not merely being asked to provide a room. It is being asked to provide a Jewish institutional backdrop for a Lithuanian government presentation of moral seriousness. It is being asked to function as the validating venue through which Lithuania may present the 157-point plan as evidence of conscience, reform, and partnership with the Jewish world. If AJC hosts in that form, the event will not read publicly as private scrutiny. It will read as institutional accommodation, and possibly as approval.

That is the imprimatur question. When AJC hosts a foreign government presentation on Holocaust memory, antisemitism, and Jewish life, what does that hosting communicate? Does it signal acquiescence, or at minimum willingness to be used as the venue through which acquiescence may be inferred?

If AJC believes its hosting carries no such meaning, it should say so plainly. More importantly, it should act accordingly.

The Record Lithuania Wants AJC to Frame

The plan Lithuania is bringing to AJC was adopted in January 2026. On paper, it is an action plan for combating antisemitism, xenophobia, and incitement while fostering Jewish life. On the public record, however, the same Lithuanian state continues to rely on institutions and narratives long central to Holocaust distortion.

One of those institutions is the Lithuanian Genocide and Resistance Research Centre, the LGGRTC. The LGGRTC has issued published outputs central to the present dispute. Those include the December 2019 document portraying Jonas Noreika as a rescuer of Jews, and the prior claim that the United States Congress had “exonerated” Juozas Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis. Congressman Brad Sherman wrote to Lithuanian authorities in 2019, 2021, and 2026 seeking retraction of that congressional-exoneration claim. No retraction has been issued. That attestation is fraudulent.

The second matter is the prosecution of Artur Fridman, a Jewish citizen of Lithuania. On October 30, 2025, the Vilnius Regional Prosecutor’s Office filed a 220-page criminal indictment, Case No. 02-2-00512-24, arising from a May 9, 2024 Facebook post Fridman made at his grandfather’s grave concerning Lithuanian wartime figures and Holocaust history. Public reporting on the indictment is available here, and the larger significance has already been analyzed in prior coverage. The prosecution remains active while Lithuania promotes the 157-point plan abroad as proof of its commitment to combating antisemitism.

A third matter followed on April 22, 2026. On that date, the Lithuanian Commission on Radio and Television issued a fine against an online critic of Lithuanian Holocaust conduct and obtained a Google takedown of the targeted article. Delfi reported on the episode with a photograph foregrounding a kippah on the head of the non-Jewish Lithuanian subject — antisemitic marking by visual association. Three months into the life of the plan Lithuania is now presenting to Jewish audiences, Lithuanian state conduct was still moving in the direction of suppression and message control, not transparent reckoning.

Staged Optics and Message Control

The same Lithuanian vice minister who will appear at AJC is also scheduled, earlier that week, to appear before a foreign-policy audience and an investment audience. At the foreign-policy appearance, the organizers stated in advance that the event would be off the record, not recorded, and not livestreamed. That matters. It is a method of message control. It blocks public scrutiny of what a senior Lithuanian official says while presenting Lithuania as a democratic authority on disinformation, governance, and resilience.

AJC should therefore answer a direct question before May 1. Will the AJC event be on the record or off the record? Will it be recorded? Will it be livestreamed? Will the presentation materials be published for the Jewish community to review? If the answer is no, then a second question follows. Will AJC permit an independent documentary crew to film the presentation and transmit it to the Jewish community together with full analysis of the Lithuanian statements against the documented Lithuanian record? If AJC will not permit independent documentary filming, it should state why.

That question goes to the event’s function. Lithuania receives the backdrop, the institutional logo, the handshake, and the image, but the Jewish community is denied full access to the words spoken and claims made. The photograph becomes the message, as in the September 2021 Nausėda-Harris decoration photograph and the October 2019 Mariaschin-Šimašius reception photograph. The record is withheld. We have seen that method before.

If AJC does not want the event read that way, it should choose transparency over optics.

This is not a first encounter. The public record shows a long-standing institutional relationship. Rabbi Andrew Baker has received Lithuanian state honors and also serves as a co-chair of the Good Will Foundation. In 2019, AJC’s press release quoted B’nai B’rith CEO Daniel S. Mariaschin praising Vilnius Mayor Šimašius after the mayor removed the memorial plaque honoring Jonas Noreika. Within weeks, a new Noreika plaque was installed on the same building. No public withdrawal by AJC or B’nai B’rith followed.

In September 2021, AJC publicly announced that Lithuanian President Nausėda bestowed the Cross of the Knight of the Order for Merits to Lithuania on then-AJC CEO David Harris.

B’nai B’rith’s official biography of Daniel Mariaschin states that he has received state decorations from the presidents of Latvia and Lithuania. The same biography states that Mariaschin initiated Holocaust education programs with the Lithuanian Ministry of Education and Science. In June 2023, B’nai B’rith announced a study mission to Lithuania and Poland led by Mariaschin that included meetings with Lithuanian officials. Its public account did not state that it demanded retraction of the Brazaitis exoneration claim, revocation of the Noreika rescuer document, publication of a perpetrator list, or removal of Lithuanian honors for Holocaust-linked figures.

According to published reporting, Lithuania’s foreign minister had already discussed the 157-point plan with AJC leadership before the May 1 event. The presentation AJC is now hosting therefore appears to continue an existing line of engagement, not initiate a first contact.

The Good Will Foundation and the Restitution Question

Rabbi Baker’s role is not limited to AJC. He is also a co-chair of the Good Will Foundation, the body that administers Lithuanian Jewish restitution funds.

Those funds are not AJC’s money. They are restitution funds derived from property stolen from Jews who were murdered. They are blood money from victims of murder. Precisely for that reason, they require public accounting.

If money taken from Holocaust victims is later administered in the name of restitution, then transparency is not optional. It is the minimum moral threshold.

Public requests for transparency about the Good Will Foundation and its arrangements have been made repeatedly over the years without substantive response. After J’Accuse! was made, Michael Kretzmer approached Rabbi Baker and asked to interview him on camera in the interest of transparency. Baker declined. That refusal may be his right. It is still relevant. A senior Jewish communal figure who holds Lithuanian state honors, helps govern Lithuanian restitution structures, and participates in public discussion of Lithuania’s Holocaust record should be expected to answer direct questions about those overlapping roles.

AJC has obstructed direct inquiry while continuing to present itself as a representative Jewish voice on Lithuania. An institution that obstructs scrutiny and still speaks in the name of the Jewish community should expect the community to ask by what authority it does so.

What Due Diligence Requires

AJC and B’nai B’rith cannot claim the privileges of diplomatic engagement without accepting the burdens of due diligence. Once an organization chooses to honor, host, partner with, praise, or otherwise publicly engage the Lithuanian state on Holocaust-memory issues, it assumes an obligation to examine the public record and answer serious questions arising from it. Silence after repeated notice is not neutrality. It is institutional choice.

The documented record shows three things. First, senior figures associated with AJC and B’nai B’rith have accepted Lithuanian state honors over a period of years. Baker, Harris, and Mariaschin are publicly documented recipients. Ted Deutch is not, so far as the public record shows. But Deutch is the AJC chief executive under whose tenure this hosting is being extended.

Second, the Lithuanian state’s contested Holocaust-memory record was publicly available throughout this chronology. The Noreika issue was public. The Brazaitis issue was public. The Fridman prosecution is public. The April 22 sequence is public. Yet no public condition appears to have been placed by AJC or B’nai B’rith on continued engagement, continued cooperation, or continued retention of honors.

Third, the May 1 event asks AJC to do something specific. It asks AJC to provide venue, audience, and institutional framing while Lithuanian officials present the 157-point plan as evidence of state seriousness about antisemitism and Jewish life. AJC may describe the event as dialogue. But hosting in that form still risks lending Jewish institutional credibility to a government presentation that should first have been tested against Lithuania’s current conduct.

Questions AJC and B’nai B’rith Should Answer Before May 1

Before this event takes place, the following questions require clear written answers.

One. Did AJC conduct due diligence on the 157-point plan, the LGGRTC record, the Fridman prosecution, and the April 22 sequence before agreeing to host this presentation? If so, AJC should publish it.

Two. Did B’nai B’rith conduct due diligence, over the course of its public praise, study missions, partnerships, and continuing engagement, regarding Lithuania’s Holocaust-memory record and Lithuania’s treatment of Jewish historical speech? If so, B’nai B’rith should publish it.

Three. Do AJC and B’nai B’rith intend to retain Lithuanian state honors accepted by David Harris, Rabbi Andrew Baker, and Daniel Mariaschin in light of the subsequent public record? If so, on what stated basis?

Four. Will AJC disclose before May 1 whether the event is on the record or off the record, whether it will be recorded or livestreamed, and whether the Lithuanian presentation materials will be published?

Five. If AJC will not itself provide full transparency, will it permit an independent documentary crew to film the presentation and transmit it to the Jewish community together with analysis of the Lithuanian statements against the documentary record?

Six. If Rabbi Baker intends to remain in overlapping positions involving AJC, Lithuanian state honors, and Lithuanian restitution governance, will he now answer direct public questions about those roles and about the repeated unanswered requests for transparency surrounding the Good Will Foundation?

These questions were asked in private and in public before this article was written. No answer was received.

I do not consent to AJC or B’nai B’rith speaking on my behalf on matters concerning the Lithuanian state. That is my position. Others may reach their own. But AJC and B’nai B’rith claim standing in the American Jewish community. If they intend to use that standing to host and validate a Lithuanian government presentation on antisemitism and Jewish life, then the Jewish community is entitled to the full record first.

Without disclosure, without due diligence, and without transparency, this event does not read as scrutiny.

It reads as credentialing.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)