AJC and Lithuania’s Fraud
Lithuania does not maintain its Holocaust narrative alone.
It is helped by Jewish institutions willing to behave as if the evidentiary environment around Lithuania does not exist. But that environment does exist, and it has existed for decades.
I have published it. Efraim Zuroff has published it. The Simon Wiesenthal Center has published it. Rūta Vanagaitė has published it. Christoph Dieckmann has published it. Saulius Sužiedėlis has published it. Yad Vashem has published it. Silvia Foti has published it. Grant Gochin has published it. Michael Kretzmer has published it. Dillon Hosier has published it. Congressman Brad Sherman has put part of it into official correspondence. The Board of Rabbis has written to Lithuania directly.
So the question is no longer whether the record is available. The question is how much critical effort a major Jewish institution must expend to pretend that nothing is going on in the environment.
No one asks about Fridman, Sherman, the Board of Rabbis, Foti, Gochin, Levin, Zuroff, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Vanagaitė, Dieckmann, Sužiedėlis, Yad Vashem, Kretzmer, Hosier, Brazaitis, Noreika, or Ramanauskas.
That level of omission does not happen by accident. It takes work. It takes discipline. It takes a conscious decision to look past this many names, this many documents, this many warnings, and still provide a warm, laudatory environment for Lithuanian politicians.
In “The Museum, the Prosecution, and AJC”, I described one example of that effort. A Lithuanian state presentation was given a respectful Jewish setting even though the surrounding record already supplied more than enough reason for challenge. That was not an oversight. It was a choice. The room was arranged to flatter, not to test.
This is the mechanism.
A Lithuanian politician arrives at a Jewish event. The language is familiar. Friendship. Shared memory. Heritage. Dialogue. The official is treated as a custodian of remembrance rather than as a representative of a state that has spent decades managing, narrowing, and falsifying the record of its own Holocaust history. The audience is asked to admire the performance and ignore the file.
AJC did not create Lithuania’s fraud. Lithuania created it. But AJC helped create the setting in which the fraud could appear untouched by controversy. Lithuania does not always need to win the argument. Often it needs only a Jewish stage on which the........
