I follow Grant Gochin’s work on Facebook, X, Substack, and Times of Israel. I do it for two reasons. Professionally, I make documentary films about Jewish memory, and Grant has become a primary source on Lithuanian Holocaust evasion. Personally, he is my friend.

I asked him why his output has accelerated so sharply before May 1, 2026. He told me he is taking excerpts from his forthcoming book, Recognition Without Reckoning: Sovereignty, Continuity, and the Architecture of Historical Evasion, and putting them into public form before the American Jewish Committee hosts Lithuanian officials. The data was already assembled. The timing was the point.

I am a Jew. I am a filmmaker. With Andrejs Hramcovs, I produced and co-directed Baltic Truth, narrated by Dudu Fisher. My grandfather family murdered in Akniste along with 175 Jews of that small Latvian town. That gives me a Baltic vantage point, but this warning is about Lithuania.

The Lithuanian script is familiar

Lithuania will tell AJC that it has confronted its history. It will cite plans, committees, education programs, and diplomatic language. It will emphasize Soviet occupation. It will speak of tragedy, tolerance, reconciliation, and shared memory.

What it will not do is name the central fact. Lithuania did not merely suffer history. Lithuanians helped make the Holocaust happen.

Before the war, Jewish citizens served Lithuania. Thousands served in the Lithuanian Army between 1918 and 1923; hundreds volunteered; dozens died; Jewish veterans later formed their own veterans’ association. The state knew who these Jews were. It conscripted them, recorded them, decorated some of them, and marked others in internal passports as “żydas” – Jew. A Jew could be Lithuanian enough to serve the state, but not Lithuanian enough to be treated as part of the nation.

In 1941, that distinction became lethal. At the Seventh Fort in Kaunas, Lithuanian guards shot thousands of Jewish men in days. A small number of Jewish military veterans were spared because Lithuanian commandant Jurgis Bobelis identified them by name. The exception proves the institutional memory. Lithuania’s bureaucracy could distinguish a Jewish veteran from other Jews when it wanted to. It chose to save a few and destroy the rest.

By the end of German occupation, more than 96 percent of Lithuanian Jews had been murdered. After the Germans withdrew, Jewish returnees and rescuers were still murdered – this time, exclusively by Lithuanians, not with Nazi assistance. No Lithuanian has served punishment for the murder of Jews. That is the record Lithuania will try to manage in the AJC room.

The inversion is now criminal

The most current expression of that record is Artur Fridman.

On May 9, 2024, Fridman, a Jewish citizen of Lithuania, honored his anti-Nazi grandfather at a Vilnius cemetery and posted criticism of Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas, a state-rehabilitated partisan. Lithuania answered with criminal prosecution, including Article 170-2 §1, the memory statute it uses to police alleged denial or gross trivialization of Soviet crimes.

That is the asymmetry. A Jewish citizen’s Facebook post is criminalized. State Holocaust distortion is contextualized.

The same state that can produce a 220-page indictment against a Jew for speech has not produced comparable criminal accountability for Lithuanian officials who minimize, sanitize, or invert the Holocaust. Lithuania knows how to act when the target is vulnerable. It knows how to delay, deflect, or praise when the target is its own historical apparatus.

I say this with pain, not pleasure. Those of us who have worked in Holocaust memory know the pattern because we have watched it repeat.

Danny Ben-Moshe’s Rewriting History exposed the “double genocide” project in 2012. Rūta Vanagaitė, a Lithuanian writer, and Efraim Zuroff of the Simon Wiesenthal Center documented Lithuanian Holocaust participation in Our People: Discovering Lithuania’s Hidden Holocaust in 2016. When Vanagaitė then questioned the heroization of Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas, her Lithuanian publisher pulled her books from circulation. Seven years later, the same protected figure put Artur Fridman under criminal indictment. Michael Kretzmer’s J’Accuse! confronted Lithuania’s Holocaust lies in 2022. Silvia Foti, the granddaughter of Jonas Noreika, told the truth about her own family in Storm in the Land of Rain. Baltic Truth addressed the Baltic killing fields, including Latvia and Lithuania, and the face-to-face elimination of Jewish communities before Auschwitz became the symbol through which the world explains the Holocaust. These films and books did not appear because Lithuania had settled the record. They appeared because Lithuania had not.

The scholarly record tells the same story. Professor Konrad Kwiet, chief historian of Australia’s Special Investigations Unit from 1987 to 1994, later exposed the wartime record of Lithuanian-Australian Bronius “Bob” Sredersas. Kwiet also resigned from Lithuania’s state-sponsored “Red-Brown Commission.” He was not the first senior scholar to conclude that Lithuania’s official memory structures could not be trusted to do the work they advertised. The pattern is not dialogue. It is recruitment, frustration, protest, and departure.

Then there is Joseph A. Melamed. Melamed was a Tel Aviv attorney, chairman of the Association of Lithuanian Jews in Israel, a Kovno Ghetto resistance survivor, and a Jewish partisan. In 1999 he compiled Crime and Punishment, a list of thousands of documented Lithuanian Holocaust perpetrators, and sent it to Lithuania’s Prosecutor General. For years, Lithuania did not answer the evidence. In 2011, Lithuania sent Interpol to his Tel Aviv office to investigate him for “slandering” Lithuanian “heroes.”

That is the precedent for Fridman. Melamed named alleged perpetrators and was treated as the problem. Fridman criticized a state hero and became the defendant. Sixteen years apart, the inversion is the same: protect the heroic myth, threaten the Jew who contests it.

The five lines AJC will hear

Lithuania has rehearsed five answers to its critics. AJC will hear all five on May 1.

It will say Lithuania is an EU and NATO member, with institutions that function like Western institutions. Membership is not function. The same state that spared selected Jewish veterans by name in 1941 sent Interpol to Joseph Melamed’s Tel Aviv office in 2011 and indicted Artur Fridman in 2025. Three sovereign frames. One reflex.

It will say its judiciary is independent. Independent of what is the question. Lithuanian courts have refused to examine state historical conclusions on procedural grounds across approximately thirty filings, I Have Only Ever Sued Lithuania. The procedural wall is not the absence of evidence. It is the design.

It will say Article 170-2 §1 is neutral and the prosecutor independent. The Statute They Refused to Apply to Themselves puts this defense on the calendar. On July 24, 2018, the same statute was offered to the same prosecutor’s office to discipline Lithuania’s state Holocaust-research institution and its named director. The prosecutor refused. Three times. Seven years later, the same office produced 220 pages against a Jewish citizen for a Facebook post. The statute did not change. The direction did.

It will say the LGGRTC is a scholarly body protected by academic freedom. When the institution is challenged, Lithuania says scholarship. When the institution is needed in a criminal indictment, Lithuania says authority. The Predicate to the Rescuer Fraud shows the method on a four-month clock. An August 29, 2019 administrative complaint demanded correction of LGGRTC’s October 2015 conclusion on Jonas Noreika. On December 17, 2019, LGGRTC reclassified Noreika as a rescuer of Jews. The institution did not retract. It escalated.

It will say Lithuania is an IHRA member and meets international Holocaust-memory standards. IHRA’s chair, honorary chair, and working-group chairs publicly warned in 2019 that LGGRTC’s Noreika defense lacked direct rescue evidence. Lithuania did not retract. Eight months later it formalized the rescuer claim. The membership card became cover for the conduct the membership was supposed to constrain.

These five lines are the script. AJC’s record after May 1 will be measured by whether AJC asked Lithuania to answer to any of them, in writing, on the meeting record.

What AJC risks becoming

This is why the May 1 event matters. Lithuania does not need AJC to endorse every sentence. It needs AJC in the room. It needs the handshake, the photograph, the caption, the proof of “sincere Jewish engagement.” The image is the product.

There is a record on AJC’s own letterhead that AJC must answer to.

In April 2019, AJC publicly criticized LGGRTC’s legal effort to distort Holocaust history. Later that year, AJC praised the removal of the Jonas Noreika plaque in Vilnius. That is the institutional position AJC placed on the public record. The 157-point plan AJC will host on May 1 is being delivered by the foreign ministry of the same state, and rests on the historical conclusions of the same institutional apparatus, that AJC condemned in 2019.

AJC owes the Jewish community an explanation. Why is AJC platforming Holocaust revisionists to Jewish leadership in 2026, after AJC condemned the same institutional record in 2019, with no public indication that the institutional record has changed.

I produced Baltic Truth without AJC. When Andrejs Hramcovs and I were making the documentary, AJC offered no involvement. The same institution that found no role in a film documenting the Baltic killing fields has found a meeting room for a Lithuanian state delegation pitching a 157-point plan.

That is an institutional choice. The Jewish community is entitled to ask why.

Lithuania has learned how to love-bomb Jewish institutions while prosecuting an individual Jew. It flatters the organization and isolates the dissenter. It speaks softly to the leadership table while moving the machinery of the state against the person who speaks outside it.

That is why AJC should be careful. Platforming Lithuania will not damage Lithuania. Lithuania has shown little concern for the damage it causes Jewish credibility. The risk falls on AJC. If the meeting becomes another photograph of Jewish institutional warmth beside Lithuanian diplomatic self-exoneration, the photo will be used for years. It will be shown wherever Lithuania needs to say: the Jews are with us; the matter is complicated; responsible Jewish leaders understand.

But responsible Jewish leaders should understand something else. Kwiet understood. Melamed understood. Ben-Moshe, Kretzmer, and I made films because we understood. The Sherman letters, the ICAN advocacy of Dillon Hosier, the city resolutions, survivor appeals, court filings, and public warnings have all met the same wall. The question is not whether Lithuania knows the facts. The question is why AJC believes Lithuania will behave differently this time.

A warning, not a courtesy

I do not want to recite this litany. No Jew should have to keep explaining to Jewish institutions that a state prosecuting a Jew for historical speech should not be rewarded with a Jewish communal photograph.

If AJC proceeds, it should ask why Lithuania prosecutes Artur Fridman while declining to prosecute its own Holocaust distorters. It should ask why perpetrators remain honored. It should ask why the LGGRTC remains treated as scholarly authority after years of documented evasion. It should ask what concrete action Lithuania will take, by date, and publish the answers and refusals.

AJC owes the Jewish community the record. The answers belong to Jews. So do the refusals. So do the evasions.

Anything less will be used.

After May 1, no attendee will be able to say the record was unavailable. The record is public. The pattern is old. The inversion is visible.

Lithuania’s method is to love-bomb the institution and prosecute the individual. AJC should not help it do both.

Platforming Holocaust revisionists to Jewish leadership is not within any Jewish institution’s remit. AJC owes worldwide Jewry an answer to one question: on whose behalf is AJC working.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)