AJC & B’nai B’rith: The Jewish Community Is Entitled to the Record |
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.........