On March 11, 2026, a banner reading “Lietuva-Lietuviams” — “Lithuania for Lithuanians” — was hung from an overpass in Vilnius on Lithuania’s Independence Day. Konstantinas Andrijauskas, an associate professor at Vilnius University, tore it down. LRT reported that police opened a pre-trial investigation into him for disturbing public order after the banner’s owner complained. The banner went up. The state’s immediate coercive response fell on the professor who removed it.

That sequence is not new in Lithuania. It is the pattern. It has been the pattern since the 1930s. The slogan has outlived the Jews it helped to murder.

In 1989, I met Vytautas Čekanauskas, Lithuania’s Honorary Consul in Los Angeles, who had already served in that role for twelve years. I told him I wanted to learn more about my Lithuanian heritage. He told me emphatically: “A Jew cannot be a Lithuanian, and a Lithuanian cannot be a Jew.” I reported this in Malice, Murder and Manipulation. I did not fully understand what he meant then. I do now.

What the slogan meant

“Lietuva-Lietuviams” was never a neutral expression of patriotism. It was a formula of ethnic ownership. Lithuania belongs to ethnic Lithuanians. Everyone else is conditional: a guest at best. But certainly a Jew could not be a Lithuanian. Not then, not now.

The Lithuanian Jewish Community has traced the slogan to the interwar weekly Verslas, where anti-Jewish exclusion and boycott politics helped prepare the ground for 1941. That matters because it shows the phrase was already functioning before the war as a public formula of ethnic and economic cleansing.

Jonas Noreika, whom Lithuania honors as a national hero, published his antisemitic pamphlet Pakelk galvą, lietuvi! — “Hold Your Head High, Lithuanian!” — in 1933, demanding the exclusion of Jews from Lithuanian economic and public life. The pamphlet was “Lietuva-Lietuviams” in written doctrine. Noreika put that doctrine into practice during the Holocaust as head of Šiauliai district, where he administered the murder of approximately 14,500 Jews. His granddaughter, Silvia Foti, exposed his record in Storm in the Land of Rain. Lithuania has not revoked his national honors. The murder of 14,500 Jewish Lithuanian citizens is not considered disqualifying — because Lithuania never regarded its Jews as Lithuanian. They held citizenship. They were never granted belonging.

The diary of Dr. Aharon Pick, the Šiauliai ghetto physician, shows what that exclusion looked like in lived form. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum notes that Pick recorded how Jewish doctors were dismissed from their posts and subjected to public humiliation. A slogan like “Lietuva-Lietuviams” does not begin with pits. It begins by teaching who belongs, who does not, and whose removal can be called national repair.

The chain is sequential, documented, and direct. Once Jews are defined as outside the nation, they can be pushed out of........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)