Disconcerting scene (above) of an EU/NATO state (in 2012!) repatriating for re-interment with full honours (amid glittering events) the remains of its 1941 Nazi puppet prime minister Juozas Ambrazevičius (Brazaitis) who personally signed orders for all the Jewish citizens of his city to be herded into and locked up in a ghetto within four weeks (after an earlier order confirmed the transfer of thousands to a local mass-murder camp). Are these the values that an EU/NATO government wants to instil in its young people?

For more information, see www.DefendingHistory.com, and 

http://stop16marchinriga.blogspot.com/

This petition, started on the eve of a conference that the Lithuanian Embassy co-sponsored in London in December 2012 on Jewish-Lithuanian issues including the Holocaust. However, is hereby renewed on the occasion of the 23 September 2013 seventieth anniversary of the liquidation of the Vilna Ghetto, due to having received no response from the Lithuanian government, and in view of the just-released multi-million euro plan to turn the old Jewish quarter and Vilna Ghetto into a Disneyland-grade tourist-bonanza site. The urgency of this petition's issues has thereby been underlined yet again, with a renewed and splendid opportunity for the government of Lithuania to now put right the serious and disturbing issues addressed in the petition. 

More information: http://defendinghistory.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/DISNEYLAND-VILNA-GHETTO.pdf

 

We the undersigned ask the President of Lithuania’s and the Lithuanian government's public support on the following urgent matters:

1) Publication of rapid and elegant apologies to the Jewish Holocaust Survivors defamed in recent years by Lithuanian prosecutors, media and some government officials. The survivors are advanced in years, making time essential if there is going to be a symbolic amelioration in the manner in which the Lithuanian state is ending a 700 year old history of Jewish settlement, and on what note, with the last survivors of the pre Holocaust generation. Most urgently, apologies for state-sponsored public defamation are due to these Holocaust Survivors: Rachel Margolis; also: Yitzhak Arad, Fania Brantsovsky, Pinchos Fridberg and Joseph Melamed.

More information:

http://defendinghistory.com/blaming-the-victims. See also the article by former UK Labour leader Gordon Brown re one of the defamed Jewish partisan heroes: 

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/women-of-courage-rachel-margolis-2236081.html. 

2) Rapid removal of the anti-Semitic exhibits and/or inscriptions in the Genocide Museum in central Vilnius and in the historic information signs supplied by the Genocide Centre to the Grūto Park memorial complex outside Druskininkai.  Rapid repeal of the 2010 ruling permitting public swastikas.

More information:

http://defendinghistory.com/genocide-museum-in-vilnius and http://defendinghistory.com/gruto-parkas-near-druskininkai/45588  andhttp://defendinghistory.com/lithuanian-court-approves-display-of-swastikas-in-public/389. The UN Human Rights Committee has taken note: http://www.ccprcentre.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/LITHUANIA-11-July.pdf.

3) Schedule for rapid removal of all state-sponsored memorials in public places and state-funded institutions to Holocaust collaborators, perpetrators and other pro-Nazi figures and organisations. Most urgent are street names honouring 1941 murderers, the lecture hall and bas relief plaque at Vytautas Magnus University honouring the 1941 Nazi puppet prime minister, and public institutions such as the Genocide Museum and Tuskulėnai Park. We recall that in 2012, your government invested heavily in the reburial of the 1941 Nazi puppet PM amidst glittering events that caused untold anguish to Holocaust Survivors and their families as well as to those whose family members and nations made vast sacrifices to free Europe from Hitler’s rule, this very recent outrage merits a public apology.

More information:

http://defendinghistory.com/memorials-to-holocaust-collaborators-in-public-spaces-and-state-sponsored-institutions-in-lithuania; http://defendinghistory.com/new/34584;http://defendinghistory.com/category/balciunass-page

4) A commitment to disallow the neo-Nazi parades in the city centres of Vilnius and Kaunas on national Independence Day holidays in 2014 and future years (with no prejudice to reassignment of venues on free speech grounds to sites and dates that do not imply gleeful state support).

More information: http://defendinghistory.com/coming-soon-5/47931 

5) Guarantee of freedom of people in Lithuania, citizens and others, to support the Seventy Years Declaration and oppose the Prague Declaration without fear of repercussion (current fear resulting under the 2010 law making “double genocide” the law of the land and criminalising dissent).

http://www.seventyyearsdeclaration.org/index.html;http://holocaustinthebaltics.com/red-brown-bill-with-two-years-of-jailtime-for-disagreeing-with-governments-position-is-signed-into-law/843.

 

6) Agreement in principle and with urgent action to preserve for posterity the last and only surviving Jewish partisan anti-Nazi fort, which is rapidly sinking into the earth and subject to vandalism and pilfering for firewood. It is a major international site testifying to the indomitable human spirit of survival against all odds.

http://holocaustinthebaltics.com/the-last-jewish-fort

7) Immediate abandonment of the state’s financing of the campaign to obfuscate the Holocaust by way of the ongoing campaign for ‘making equal’ Nazi and Soviet crimes, via commissions, conferences, events, publications and the continuing pressure in the European Union and European Parliament; deletion of the revisionist goals announced for Lithuania’s 2013 presidency of the EU, a deletion which can only enhance Lithuania’s authority and prestige for the fulfilling of the role in a manner which the fine people of Lithuania deserve and merit. 

More information: http://defendinghistory.com/lithuanian-foreign-minister-includes-historical-memory-policy-double-genocide-among-nations-prime-goals/39153;http://holocaustinthebaltics.com/red-brown-commissions/critiques;

Attempts of the Lithuanian government to ingratiate itself to current Jewish communities in Britain, Canada, Israel, South Africa, and the United States, among others, a whilst continuing to actively fund and support precisely the opposite goals as exemplified by the above issues, can only be seen as wholly duplicitous and unacceptable, undermining even the public relations goals of such events, to the detriment of all parties concerned.

With the sincere intent of repairing Lithuanian-Jewish relations and calling for the citizens of Lithuania to enjoy the same standards as citizens of any other EU and NATO state, we the undersigned request that the Lithuanian presidency and government addresses, without further delay and as a matter of urgency, the seven matters raised within this petition.