Larisa, this man is representative of a large swath of the Government / Government employees. It is a provable fact that even in 2013, their Interior Ministry still designates files by who is Jewish. There are enough repetitive indications by members of their Government, that this is not an isolated incident.

Business can only be operated where there is rule of law, and objective courts. For those interested in engaging in business in Lithuania, please understand how law is applied in Lithuania, watch this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LKgodCyGMI&fe...

Zane, you are a Saint, and every recipient deserves every possible means with which anybody can help.

Andrius, you are kind to offer assistance. I don’t know what anybody can do to help. I don’t know what goes on there, it seems that the left hand doesn’t know what the right is doing.

I’m not sure that the Government is so mal intentioned, I remain in complete disbelief that PM Kubilius signed the Brazaitis order, I am hoping that he was tricked into signing it because I cannot bring myself to believe he did it deliberately.

Perhaps a few mal intentioned people in various departments are exercising personal agendas, and cumulatively it appears as a hate agenda by the country. I have recommended to certain members of the LT Government that entire Departments be fired, but there seems to be no will to counter these internal activities.

I don’t think it productive to put out each fire as it comes up, this must be addressed in a comprehensive manner. NGO’s like http://litvak-cemetery.info/index.php?lang=en (of which I am on the Advisory Board) are doing solid work to educate LT youth, but it’s the Government’s job, not our job. They have to start by reviewing textbooks and educating the educators. Building plaques that have gone up to honor murderers should be brought down, schools and public facilities renamed. The entire tone of the conversations needs to be brought down a few notches in order for people to be able to talk to each other and learn that there are multiple narratives. Right now there is zero trust, and I completely understand why that is. The ball is in LT’s Court to conduct itself in an appropriate manner, but it’s gone so far that where does one even start at this point?

Genocide was the term first used about the Holocaust, but it’s not applicable only to the Holocaust. Certainly it’s applicable to the Armenians and the Rwandans as well, and perhaps a few more. I do not have the academic credentials to determine where exactly it should apply, but in a recent article in LT, the newspaper referred to a “Holocaust of chickens”. Words have power, and when a word such as Holocaust is used about the slaughter of chickens, we can understand why it’s power is so diminished in LT, and why schoolchildren cannot understand.

I do not see any current power that would be a threat to the Sovereignty of LT. The world has changed, and it’s time LT matured into a nation that can address its past with honesty and dignity. LT has had since 1991 to address its history, I hear when you say that LT is slow, but this slowness comes at a high price for LT. I am optimistic that people like you and like Darius Udrys that understand, that can communicate openly and empathetically, can lead the way forward. If we don’t have hope for the future, we have only bitterness, and that is no way to raise the next generation.
We should start a new comment stream - this is getting too narrow.

Aside from Noreicka, and so many other examples, remember this:
http://www.holocaustinthebaltics.com/2009Dec3USCo...

Andrius, around 230,000 Jewish Lithuanian citizens were murdered in the Holocaust. That isn’t died, that is murdered.

I think 51,000 Lithuanian citizens (of all kinds, many of them Jews) died or were murdered in the Soviet deportations.

Of about 132,000 Lithuanians deported, about 80,000 returned. Contrast that to the number of Jews that survived the Holocaust. The reason that there was even a 5% Jewish survival rate was BECAUSE so many Jews had been deported, that those that survived, built the Jewish survival rate UP to 5%.

It is notable that Jews that survived and returned to Lithuania, some were then murdered by Lithuanians even after the war ended.

The murder / death of 80,000 out of then perhaps 2,500,000 is state sponsored terrorism, not genocide, yet look what it took for the LT Genocide Museum to even mention Jews.

There are perhaps 3,500 Litvaks left in LT now, there are many, many more ethnic LT’s in LT now than the start of the war. With these basic facts, how can the LT Government be trying to draw an equivalence between the two disasters? They are quantitatively, and qualitatively different.

For those LT’s that did not get involved and commit actual murders, how many shared the loot? The participation was widespread. An absence of leadership aside, contrast that to a people like the Albanians where not one Jew was murdered because the Albanian citizenry protected their neighbors, and where the Jewish population actually increased during the war. Whatever the circumstances were on the ground, the culpability of the LT population is clear.

There are too few Jews to be able to get involved. From a pre-war population percentage of about 7%, to now being 0.0001% of the population, who is there left to engage? The Lithuanians did a remarkable job. The LT Government has done a very effective job of opposing diaspora Jewish engagement, why would a Jew today want to engage with LT? I don’t think Litvaks “hate” LT’s. There are so few Litvaks that even think of themselves as Litvaks anymore. LT is today, for most Jews of LT heritage, a distant place that murdered our families and hasn’t progressed much since then. It’s indifference, not hate. Again, the LT Government has done everything in its power to alienate Litvaks that tried to re-engage, there are few left that care. Re-engagement has been left too late.

You ask difficult, soul searching questions. Those are questions LT society must ask of themselves and answer for themselves. One poignant question that you ask is if your Grandparents generation could do what they did, might it be possible for this generation to do similar. I would say that when the Government of Lithuania has hidden the truth, and then lied above that, that the chances are substantially higher. Progress can only be made through truth telling, and a genuine desire for reconciliation, which is just one of the many reasons that what is described in this article is so egregious.

Andrius, I would like to continue this conversation, but this is not the forum, this forum is about Felstein & the LT Embassy.
Why don't you e mail me off this board and we can continue - use ggochin(at) facebook (.) com

Andrius, I am pleased you point out that more LT’s have emigrated than were ever deported. Imagine for a moment if LT had not murdered her Jewish citizens, LT could today be a major academic and financial center. The problems LT suffer today can be directly traced back to the actions of those murderers. LT should be teaching that THEY were the ones that destroyed LT, rather than teaching that they are heroes. I am having difficulty separating out LT re-burying Brazaitis with honors versus if Germany had re-buried Adolph Hitler with honors. Can you please explain to me the difference?
The intentions of the Interim Government were clear from the beginning, simply read their decrees. Just as Hitler said he was going to murder Europe’s Jews, LAF said so too, and they did. When Seimas was going to vote that the interim Government was the legitimate Government of LT, they would have legitimized those decrees for the current Government. Donskis stopped them in time. It’s shameful.
The figure I have been told (and I do not know if it’s true) is that 80% of LT Jewish citizens were murdered by ethnic LT citizens. If that is true, or whatever the # might be, why is this truth not being taught in schools in LT? Rather, 5th grade teaching materials in use in Vilnius today reflect that “some” Jews were murdered because of their Soviet participation. Given this Felstein fiasco, Brazaitis, teaching materials, etc, how are Jews like me supposed to look at the LT State with any trust at all?. We hear plenty of platitudes, but actions take the opposite position.
Litvaks inside LT are a tiny minority, there are so few and the average age is high, soon there will be nothing left of Litvak culture within LT, so the divide between LT and Litvaks in the diaspora matters.
Andrius, you grew up in LA & attended St Casimir’s. I participated in a class there in (I think) 2005, the kids had virtually zero knowledge of Jewish LT.
You use the example of Israeli’s honoring Begin after he fought the British, but at that time, the British were the enemy in Israel. At no time were Jews ever the enemy inside Lithuania.
How can it be that a school is named for Noreika? That sends an unambiguous message to children that violence and racism is acceptable, or may be dismissed, so then why question the current rate of violence, alcoholism or suicides in LT? You say your line in the sand for Noreika is if he personally had blood on his hands, or if he just signed orders. Hitler probably never had blood on his hands directly, but he signed orders too. Your line does not work Andrius. There has to be a better yardstick to be used in LT. Words coming from LT are absolutely meaningless, it will take very many years for any trust to ever re-develop. How sad.

Mr. Felstein claims that the photo he presented is of a shtetl called Skaudvilė, and that he was having the cemetery restored, however, http://litvak-cemetery.info/index.php?option=com_...
shows that the work he was claiming to be doing, was already done in 2010, so his “restoration” was simply having two years of grass growth mowed and removed. So why is he fundraising? Mowing grass does not cost much money, especially if done by volunteers.

From the last paragraph in the article: “Felstein said. “I speak on behalf of those who are buried in Lithuania, our forefathers, our history in Lithuania” – how does somebody come along and suddenly be the Spokesperson for those buried in Lithuania? Did they posthumously appoint him?
When the assistant Director of the Vilnius Yiddish Institute says Felstein has no understanding – what qualifies him to speak on Jewish history in Lithuania?.
He wears a yarmulke and claims to speak for our “Forefathers” when he merely spouts the Lithuanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs talking points. Our Forefathers, who came from positions of complete integrity and dignity would be sickened at the idea that this person could possibly speak for them, but he doesn’t!

Mr. Felstein: He claimed to have made more progress “with the reconnection of the Jews and the Lithuanians” than his critics have made since Lithuania gained independence. – What of people like Howard Margol who have led about 19 trips to Lithuania? What about the innumerable leaders that have attempted to create dialog, only to walk away when realizing it was pointless?

Mr. Felstein claims to have written the opinion pieces referred to in this article, but a simple examination of his writing style shows that he did not author them. Who did? The Ministry of Foreign Affairs?

It would be interesting to examine who Mr. Felstein’s initial Board Members were in this exercise, and how almost every one of them removed themselves. When credible people withdrew, why is it that they could see what was going on, but the Embassy could not? If the Embassy is promoting somebody, should they not verify his credentials?

The Embassy is having him work on their “Embassy Series”, the initial locations dates were:
Sunday September 9, 2012 - at 6th & I Historic Synagogue, Washington, DC
Thursday September 13, 2012 at the Jewish Museum, Philadelphia, PA
Thursday September 20, 2012 at the YIVO Institute, New York, NY
Sunday September 23, 2012 at the Holocaust Museum in Skokie, IL

Now 6th & I in DC and YIVO are no longer on their schedule. Why? When they were advertising them, did they have YIVO on there to manufacture credibility, or did YIVO cancel them? If this was genuine, why would YIVO not allow them on their premises, so one has to take a very clear message from the two organizations that have booted them out & ask why the other two have not.

Andrius, There are many in LT that are atoning. From a sick woman who told me that she cursed her grandparents generation, because she knew that had LT been populated by Litvak Doctors, she might have been cured. From a young school teacher in Birzai who has taken it upon himself to restore the Jewish cemetery, all forms of good deeds exist among Lithuanian people that are inherently good people. Unfortunately it is a non volunteering society that do not get involved in other’s affairs, so when they watched a few thousand crazed murderers murdering their friends, they just looked away. The scale of the “sharing” of the loot, was, I believe, far more widespread.
We each do have our “own” histories, but that means one at least is incorrect, there needs to be one, official, correct, comprehensive history, and it is that history that needs to be taught to the children, not the mistruths that are taught now.
It is pointless for Litvaks to speak out on what irks us, because it seems to matter naught. Felstein irked us the moment we realized what was going on. People told the Embassy, but nonetheless, they promoted him, and promoted him more. Now it has expanded to this article, and how do they now step back from this?
Here is another example of what goes on. Read this article: http://www.15min.lt/en/article/culture-society/li...
I am told that Mr. Sarapinas is a “good guy”, and I believe that, but shortly after the event in this article, he was the Lithuanian Government representative at the exhumation of the remains of Brazaitis. Should he have refused to participate? Would he have been able to refuse to participate? Did he even know who Brazaitis was? But the next time Sarapinas is in front of a Jewish organization that knows he was at the dis-internment, would anybody be able to consider him credible when mourning Jews?
With every step that LT takes forward, they seem to take three steps back. There seems to be no underlying homework before they do anything (why did they not do a background check on Felstein before making him their Spokesperson?, when issues were brought to their attention, why did they not investigate? Why put Felstein in front of high level government officials if all of this even had a possibility of being exposed? Why select someone to do the dis-internment that appears before Jewish groups? Etc. etc. etc. ), so they seem surprised when things don’t work. People of goodwill have offered to assist them. Dialog and reconciliation take an extraordinary amount of work, it does not appear that LT is willing to put in the effort that it takes to create that, and for every day that passes, the work that is needed grows greater and more difficult.
Re Noreika’s name removal - begin with a letter to the Minister of Education with a copy to the Minister of Culture, with a full and complete description of why it needs to be changed, along with backup material.