As someone who spent 16 years of his life growing up in the Soviet system, I know what state silence sounds like. In the Soviet Union, silence was not the absence of a response. It was the response. When the state refused to answer a question, the refusal was the answer: the question had touched something the state could not afford to acknowledge. The technique was not subtle. It did not need to be. It relied on a single calculation: that the person asking would eventually stop asking. I learned this as a child. I am watching Lithuania rely on the same calculation now.

Dillon Hosier, CEO of the Israeli American Civic Action Network, wrote recently about the formal letter he sent on March 15, 2026, to the Lithuanian consul general in Los Angeles, demanding answers about Lithuania’s criminal prosecution of the Jewish citizen Artur Fridman and about the institutional machinery behind that prosecution. He asked specific questions. He provided documentary context. Lithuania has not responded.

Congressman Brad Sherman has written three times to the Government of Lithuania — in 2019, in 2021, and again in March 2026, regarding a specific, documented fabrication: the repeated false claim by Lithuania’s Genocide and Resistance Research Center that the United States Congress had “completely exonerated” the Holocaust perpetrator Juozas Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis. That exoneration never happened. Lithuania did not answer in 2019. It did not answer in 2021. It did not answer in 2026. Not once in seven years.

Rabbi Ahud Sela, President of the Board of Rabbis of Southern California, wrote directly to Lithuanian Consul General Sandra Brikaite expressing serious concern about the Fridman prosecution and requesting an update. No response followed.

A sitting member of Congress. A national civic advocacy organization. The President of the Board of Rabbis of Southern California. All wrote. Lithuania answered none of them. I recognize this pattern. I grew up inside it.

In the Soviet Union, we had a phrase for institutions that operated this way. We called them “deaf offices”, bureaucracies that could hear perfectly well but had made a policy decision to not respond. The Soviet version was at least honest about its nature: it was an authoritarian state and did not pretend otherwise. Lithuania is a member of the European Union and NATO. It has signed the relevant human rights instruments. It participates in the relevant commemorations. It collects the relevant charitable subsidies from Brussels. And it operates a deaf office indistinguishable in function from the one I knew in Riga, except that the one in Riga did not claim to be a democracy.

The facts of the Fridman case are not in dispute.

On May 9, 2024,........

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