I write in good faith, as a member of the community these organizations serve, with questions I hope their leadership will treat seriously.

The American Jewish Committee’s former long-serving CEO David Harris received the Cross of the Knight of the Order for Merits to Lithuania in 2021. AJC’s Director of International Jewish Affairs, Rabbi Andrew Baker, received the Officer’s Cross of Merit in 2006 and the Lithuanian Diplomacy Star in 2012. B’nai B’rith International’s chief executive, Daniel S. Mariaschin, has received a Lithuanian state decoration. Grant Gochin has written on these honors with wit in Size Matters.

Lithuanian state honors are issued under a single body of state-awards law. The register that honors Mr. Harris, Rabbi Baker, and Mr. Mariaschin also carries honors conferred on figures whose Holocaust records have been independently documented. Is this the register in which these recipients wish their names to remain?

The Good Will Foundation

Rabbi Baker also co-chairs the Good Will Foundation, which administers Lithuania’s restitution payments for the confiscated immovable property of Lithuania’s pre-war Jewish religious communities. The Foundation receives approximately 3.6 million euros annually. Its declared mission states that funds are to be distributed “in a transparent, fair and effective manner.” These are not ordinary foundation funds. They are the residue of annihilation. 220,000 Lithuanian Jews were murdered, most by their own neighbors. Money of this provenance carries an obligation to the murdered that ordinary philanthropic money does not.

Rabbi Sholom Ber Krinsky, the Chabad rabbi who has served Vilnius for more than thirty years, has publicly and repeatedly requested detailed disclosure of the Foundation’s receipts and expenditures. His published record documents year after year in which his religious school received nothing while grants were directed outside Lithuania with limited public accounting. He is not the only party to have asked. Full transparency has not been provided.

Lithuania’s only first place

To our knowledge, Lithuania has never finished first in the world on any benchmark by which modern states are ordinarily measured. Not in science, medicine, technology, education, or living standards. In the entire history of its existence as an independent state, Lithuania has achieved exactly one global first: the highest Jewish murder rate of the Holocaust. 96.4%. Higher than Germany. Higher than Poland. 220,000 Jews murdered, most by Lithuanians. Not a single Lithuanian has been punished for the murder of a single Jew since 1990.

The flagship cultural institution of this state, formerly called the Museum of Genocide Victims, commemorates Soviet deportations. The murder of 220,000 Jews received no dedicated exhibition space until 2011. The building’s exterior wall carries a memorial to Jonas Noreika, a documented........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)