The record is not missing. Lithuania has archives, signatures, court filings, international rebukes, and its own institutional admissions. What it lacks is institutional permission to let evidence produce consequences. Its prosecutors and courts now perform that function. They do not merely fail to correct the memory apparatus. In Holocaust-memory cases, they complete it.

I have never met Artur Fridman in person. I have never spoken to him by voice. We have exchanged a few text messages. I write here as a Jewish litigant against Lithuania who has documented the institutional architecture within which his prosecution now sits, not as anyone speaking for him. The indictment speaks for itself. The pattern around it speaks for itself.

Two Lithuanian state institutions sit at the center of every Holocaust-memory question that reaches a courtroom. The Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania, or LGGRTC, holds the state mandate to research genocide, occupation, and resistance. The International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes in Lithuania holds parallel responsibilities and has, on occasion, contradicted the LGGRTC publicly. The pattern is consistent: evidence enters as documentation; it exits as exoneration. The two final institutions in that pattern are the prosecutor’s office and the courts.

Three Refusals, One Indictment

Begin with what Lithuanian prosecutors did before the courts ever reached the question. Article 170-2 §1 of the Lithuanian Criminal Code criminalizes public approval, denial, or gross belittling of crimes against Lithuania or its inhabitants. It is the same statute now invoked against Artur Fridman.

In August 2018, I asked the Vilnius Public Prosecutor’s Office to apply Article 170-2 §1 against the LGGRTC for its October 25, 2015 memorandum on Jonas Noreika, in which the Centre declared his participation in Holocaust crimes “unproven.” Noreika signed the August 22, 1941 order establishing the Šiauliai district ghetto from which my family was murdered. The prosecutor refused.

In September 2018, I filed a second application under the same statute. The prosecutor refused again, with formal written notice on November 12, 2018.

In November 2019, after the LGGRTC published its December 2019 reclassification of Noreika as a rescuer of Jews — a finding publicly repudiated by the Dean of Vilnius University’s History Faculty and by the head of the Lithuanian History Institute — I filed a third application. The prosecutor refused for the third time.

Three applications. Three refusals. The same statute, the same office, the same statutory threshold. Five years later, that same office filed the indictment against Mr. Fridman. The threshold the office could not find when LGGRTC distorted the Holocaust, the office located precisely when a Jewish citizen contradicted LGGRTC mythology on Facebook. That is law as a directional weapon.

The Courts as Gatekeepers

The Lithuanian courts then performed their part. The Vilnius Regional Administrative Court, in Case No. eI-534-281/2019, dismissed my challenge on the theory that my communication was merely a “request for information.” The Supreme Administrative Court dismissed on April 1, 2020, holding that LGGRTC historical publications fell outside administrative-law jurisdiction. Other courts followed the same path. My complete record of legal actions since 2015 documents approximately thirty formal challenges. Not once did a Lithuanian court reach the merits.

The effect was simple. A state institution with a parliamentary mandate to research Nazi and Soviet crimes became, by judicial construction, beyond administrative review when its output concerned Holocaust distortion. The cases died at the gate, not on the merits.

If LGGRTC publications are merely informational and nonreviewable when victims’ descendants challenge them, they cannot be authoritative factual predicates when prosecutors need them. Lithuania cannot insulate the state memory institution from review when accused of falsification, then weaponize its conclusions against a private citizen. That is precisely what the Fridman prosecution does.

Lithuania can say that no court has found the LGGRTC wrong. But no court has found the LGGRTC right either. The courts refused to look. That refusal is now being laundered into authority. That is not the rule of law. It is the rule of narrative — what Soviet courts did when they transformed state narrative into legal fact, refused independent confrontation with evidence, and called the result due process.

Lithuania Has Been Told

Lithuania cannot say it was not warned. Congressman Brad Sherman of California — Senior Member of the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee — wrote to Prime Minister Saulius Skvernelis on September 25, 2019, dismantling the LGGRTC’s claim that the United States had “completely exonerated” Holocaust collaborator Juozas Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis. The LGGRTC dismissed the letter as “the opinion of a politician.” Sherman wrote again on May 25, 2021, to Lithuanian Ambassador Audra Plepytė. She did not reply. She is now Lithuania’s Deputy Foreign Minister. Sherman wrote a third time on March 20, 2026. As of this writing, no known response. The complete sequence is documented in “US Congress Exposes Lithuania’s Holocaust Fraud,” JNS, March 2026.

Three American cities also placed Lithuania on the public record. On May 19, 2020, Beverly Hills adopted Resolution 20-R-13290, condemning Lithuanian Holocaust denial and naming the LGGRTC. On August 3, 2020, West Hollywood adopted Resolution 20-5314. In August 2020, Los Angeles adopted its own resolution. Lithuania has never responded to any of them.

Lithuania’s own statutory oversight body reached the same conclusion. On March 22, 2026, the Seimas-established expert council overseeing the LGGRTC formally informed the Seimas that it could not work with LGGRTC leadership. The prosecution of Mr. Fridman proceeded.

The Loop in Operation

Artur Fridman visited Antakalnis Cemetery on May 9, 2024, to honor his grandfather Aron Fridman, a Jewish soldier who fought against Nazi Germany in the Red Army. He posted a Facebook message questioning the heroization of Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas. The state’s response was a 220-page criminal indictment, documented in “The Indictment That Put Lithuania on Trial,” JNS, and Michael Kretzmer’s “Lithuania Has Put Itself, Not Artur Fridman, on Trial,” The Times of Israel.

This is the same state that refused to apply criminal memory law against state Holocaust distortion, whose courts refused to examine challenges to LGGRTC outputs, and that now treats those outputs as usable against a Jewish citizen who chose May 9 to honor his grandfather. The Jewish family-memory significance of May 9 — the date Nazi Germany’s defeat began to end the conditions under which Lithuanians had murdered Jews with impunity — is the frame the state refuses to allow.

The asymmetry is the case. Silence in one direction. Force in the other.

The Deception Project

Lithuanian diplomats are paid to manage Jewish perception of Lithuania. The product they sell is a country of values, virtues, rule of law, Western democracy, journalistic freedom, IHRA membership, and Holocaust education. Each of those terms signals Western legitimacy. Each is the inversion of what the documentary record establishes.

A state that prosecutes a Jewish citizen for a Facebook post about a state-canonized partisan is not defending freedom of speech. It is criminalizing it. A state whose courts refuse merits review of Holocaust-distortion challenges is not practicing the rule of law. It is practicing the rule of narrative. A state whose primary historical institution fabricates a U.S. Congressional finding is not practicing scholarly integrity. It is corrupting it.

The diplomatic project, examined honestly, is to convince Jewish audiences to disbelieve the documentary record and disbelieve their own observation of how Lithuania actually behaves.

Begin with the institution at the center of the Lithuanian diplomatic package. The LGGRTC presents internationally as a scholarly research body. Its own historian has acknowledged otherwise. As I have documented, Dr. Alfredas Rukšėnas, an LGGRTC historian, has stated that the institution does not function as a scientific body but serves “nationalist, pro-Nazi, political interest groups.” Lithuania’s parliament has reached the same conclusion structurally. In a February 10, 2021 Seimas oversight discussion, members stated on the record that the LGGRTC “is not a scientific, academic institution.” That admission, by an institutional staff historian and by Lithuania’s own parliament, ends the analytical question. An institution acknowledged by its own staff and by its own legislature as ideological cannot supply scholarly conclusions to a criminal prosecution. The Fridman indictment is built on a foundation that the institution’s own staff have publicly characterized as ideological.

Now examine the document AJC has chosen to commend. On January 21, 2026, the Lithuanian government adopted a 157-point Action Plan for Combating Antisemitism, Xenophobia, and Any Other Form of Incitement to Hatred and for Fostering Jewish Life. Foreign Minister Kęstutis Budrys personally presented the plan to AJC CEO Ted Deutch at the Munich Security Conference in February 2026. Three months before the May 1 hosting, AJC’s chief executive received the plan from the Lithuanian Foreign Minister face to face.

The plan operates within an institutional framework in which the LGGRTC remains the state’s authoritative historical body on Holocaust matters. A national strategy to combat antisemitism, architected around an institution publicly acknowledged by its own historian as serving nationalist, pro-Nazi political interest groups, is not a strategy to combat antisemitism. It is a strategy to manage Jewish perception while leaving the production of antisemitic historical narrative undisturbed. The title of the plan and the substance of the institution it relies on stand in direct contradiction. Anyone who endorses the plan without examining the institution has performed no due diligence at all. Anyone who has examined the institution and endorses the plan anyway has chosen narrative management over the truth.

On May 1, 2026, the American Jewish Committee will host Lithuania. Examine AJC’s actual public posture toward Lithuania in 2026. On February 6, AJC posted a single statement on X addressing Lithuania’s newly adopted national strategy to combat antisemitism. It opened: “We appreciate that Lithuania has finally adopted a national strategy.” It noted the strategy lacked new initiatives, lacked reference to Jewish community security needs, lacked a Holocaust education mandate, and lacked an oversight body. It closed: “AJC stands ready to assist the Lithuanian government in improving its plan.” 1,785 views, twenty-eight likes, ten retweets.

The post addresses an implementation gap in a strategy document. It does not address the institution at the heart of the strategy. It does not address what years of public reporting and litigation have placed in the record. AJC’s research function either did not surface what is in the record, or did surface it and AJC’s leadership chose not to act. Either reading produces the same operational result: AJC is hosting Lithuania on May 1.

The audiences are different by design. The 1,785 viewers of the February 6 post are AJC’s passing X audience. The May 1 audience is AJC’s donors, constituents, and the wider Jewish leadership for whom AJC functions as a credentialing institution. The polite tweet was for the followers; the hosting is the endorsement. AJC’s passing X post does not constitute knowledge in any operational sense. AJC’s May 1 hosting does. The hosting is the institutional act, the endorsement that lands, and what Lithuanian diplomats will reference, in future, as evidence that the major American Jewish organizations regard Lithuania as a partner. The photographs taken on May 1 are what they will market — to Brussels, to Washington, to other Jewish organizations they have not yet engaged — as proof of legitimacy. As has been documented elsewhere, Lithuanian state-aligned media curate which photographs of Jewish engagement to publish and which to suppress. The May 1 photographs will be the next exhibit in that curation.

The May 1 event is not neutral. It is the deception project succeeding. Lithuanian diplomats will not address the Fridman prosecution, the three prosecutorial refusals against the LGGRTC, the courts’ refusal of merits review, Sherman’s three letters, or Beverly Hills, West Hollywood, and Los Angeles. They will speak about values, partnership, shared democratic commitments, IHRA participation, and Holocaust remembrance. Each of those words has been inverted by the documented record. AJC, by hosting the event, allows the inversion to land on an American Jewish audience as if it were the truth.

AJC is not the only such organization. B’nai B’rith, WJRO, and others receive Lithuanian diplomatic engagement. As I have written elsewhere, the worldwide Jewish community is entitled to the record. The May 1 hosting is the test case. AJC has been informed.

A democratic state allows citizens to challenge state mythology, allows historians to publish contested findings, allows journalists to identify state fabrications, and allows victims’ descendants to seek judicial remedy. Lithuania does none of these. It prosecutes the citizen, threatens the historian, ignores the journalist, refuses the descendant. Then it tells Jewish audiences, through its diplomats, that it is a democratic state committed to freedom of speech.

Freedom of speech protects the speaker who challenges the state. Lithuania prosecutes the speaker who challenges the state. The IHRA Working Definition of Holocaust Denial and Distortion identifies as distortion the practice of “attempts to blur the responsibility for the establishment of concentration and death camps devised and operated by Nazi Germany by putting blame on other nations or ethnic groups” and the “gross minimization” of “the role of collaborators.” Apply both definitions to Lithuania’s conduct, then to the Fridman prosecution. The state distorting the record prosecutes the citizen describing it. That is the inversion.

Lithuania is not asking AJC to host a partner. It is asking AJC to host the inversion of every term it claims to share with the West. AJC is free to do so. AJC will then own the record.

The question is no longer whether Lithuania possesses the evidence. It does. The question is whether Lithuania will allow evidence to matter, and whether the Jewish organizations engaging Lithuania will allow it to matter when Lithuania asks them not to. So far, Lithuania’s answer is no. AJC’s answer, on May 1, will be the next entry in the public record.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)