I was born in Riga, Latvia. My family suffered under Nazis and under Soviets. With my whole heart, I say emphatically — it is reprehensible to deny or minimize Soviet crimes, Nazi crimes, Latvian or Lithuanian crimes, or any crimes.

For Latvian and Lithuanian Jews, survival was not merely unlikely. It was intolerably fragile. To survive the Nazi invasion, a Jew had to flee east in panic, leave everything behind, and hope to outpace annihilation. To return after the war was to discover something worse: that survival itself could provoke murderous rage from your neighbors who would not tolerate even the remnant of Jewish life.

One family’s fate exposes that truth.

On the night of May 11–12, 1946 — one year and two days after the Nazis were driven from Lithuania — three Lithuanians dynamited the home of the Berelovitz family in Žemaičių Naumiestis, known in Yiddish as Neishtot. Four family members were murdered: Nekha Berelovitz, her daughter Hanah, her brother Asher Joselevitz, and Mordehai Berelovitz. A fifth, Shelomoh Berelovitz, survived only because the blast threw him through a window. The Yizkor record preserves the account.

The Berelovitz family had done what almost no Lithuanian Jew managed to do. When Nazis invaded on June 22, 1941, they escaped with the retreating Red Army, survived the war in the Soviet interior, and came home alive — severely damaged, carrying the weight of extreme suffering and what we now recognize as post-traumatic stress. They returned to their own house, in their own town. And their Lithuanian neighbors murdered them over a year after the Holocaust had ended in Lithuania.

At trial, one of the murderers explained why. He killed the Jews because he could not tolerate Jews returning to Neishtot and settling there again.

The motive was not robbery. It was not a personal dispute. It was not anti-Soviet resistance. It was Lithuanian annihilationist hate which could not tolerate a single living Jew continuing to exist. Before the Nazis arrived in Lithuania, Lithuanian leadership was calling for the elimination of Jews. Over a year after the Nazis left, Lithuanians were still carrying out that mandate.

What Neishtot Had Already Become

Before the Nazi invasion, approximately 100 to 110 Jewish families lived in Neishtot. Jews had been part of this town since the seventeenth century — 59% of the population in 1897. They built two synagogues, a Hebrew school, a library, and a communal life stretching from Neishtot to South Africa to Israel.

Within weeks of the invasion, Lithuanian police and paramilitaries destroyed that community. On July 19, 1941, about 70 elderly and sick Jews were shot at Šiaudvičiai by Lithuanian policemen. The remaining men were sent to forced labor at Heydekrug. In September 1941, all women and children were taken to Šiaudvičiai and murdered. The Koniuchowsky testimonies and the Yizkor record document that of those sent to Heydekrug, seven survived.

Seven. Out of a town where Jews had lived for over three centuries.

Across Lithuania, the pattern held. Of approximately 210,000 Jews, 96.4% were murdered — the highest slaughter rate in Europe. The Jäger Report accounts for 133,346 people murdered in a single year, with Lithuanian auxiliaries explicitly credited as essential for the slaughter. There is no reference in the Jäger Report of Lithuanians objecting or refusing to murder Jews. It describes only how essential Lithuanian participation was. By war’s end, few Lithuanian Jews remained alive.

The Berelovitz family returned to a town where synagogues had been desecrated, homes emptied, neighbors buried in mass graves three kilometers east of town. The Yizkor book records also note that a Jew named Katz was killed in Neishtot in 1945, before the Berelovitz dynamiting. Dr. Samuel Barnai documented the wider hostility confronting the tiny remnant of Lithuanian Jewry. The war had ended. The murders had not.

Lithuania promotes itself internationally as a nation of rescuers, claiming the “per capita largest percentage” of Righteous Among the Nations. The number stands at 924 — 0.04% of the population. Possibly tens of thousands participated directly in the killing. The ratio is not ambiguous. It is damning.

Yet Lithuania inverts it. The 924 become the national story. The thousands of killers are renamed as partisans, resistance fighters, national heroes. This is not remembrance. It is a calculated insult to every murdered Jew: your killers are our heroes, and we will use the handful of decent people among us as a screen to hide what the rest of us did to you.

The evidence is not hidden. The Jäger Report is public. The Koniuchowsky testimonies are accessible. Silvia Foti published the truth about her own grandfather in Storm in the Land of Rain. As Foti herself wrote in “I Told the Truth, Lithuania Didn’t Care,” telling the truth inside Lithuania carries a price. The evidence is ignored — not because it is unavailable, but because it is intolerable.

No Jew should accept the Lithuanian rescuer narrative at face value. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance has identified Lithuania as a Holocaust distortion state. As I have written, too many Jewish organizations remain gullible. For over thirty years, Jewish institutions have stood alongside Lithuanian officials at podiums, lending credibility to a state that has not corrected a single central falsehood. Are these relationships in service to Jewish memory, or to Lithuanian reputation management? The results answer the question: not a single perpetrator punished, not a single rehabilitated murderer’s record corrected — and a Jew prosecuted for a Facebook post.

Soviet Justice, Lithuanian Reversal

Under Soviet rule, the Berelovitz murderers were prosecuted. Three received 25-year sentences. One hanged himself during the proceedings. Soviet courts, for all their systemic brutality, treated the murder of Jews as a crime.

Then the Soviets left. On May 2, 1990, the government of President Vytautas Landsbergis — the son of a Holocaust perpetrator — established a commission to rehabilitate persons convicted of resisting Soviet occupation. Almost 23,000 were rehabilitated. Efraim Zuroff has identified at least twelve cases in which Lithuanians directly involved in mass killings of Jews were swept into this rehabilitation. Murderers became victims. Victims vanished. Murderers became heroes.

The Prosecution That Became a Self-Indictment

Lithuania built the LGGRTC to protect the partisan mythology — an institution its own Seimas-created expert council described as “de jure a research center, de facto a bureaucratic institution.” Jonas Noreika, who ordered the murder of Jews in Plungė, was glorified as a national hero. Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas was reburied with full state honors in 2018.

On May 9, 2024, Artur Fridman, a Jewish Lithuanian citizen, visited Antakalnis Cemetery in Vilnius to honor his grandfather — a Jew who had fought Nazis during the Second World War. May 9 is Victory Day: the date Nazi Germany was defeated. For Jews, it marks the end of the Nazi phase of the Holocaust. But the Berelovitz case proves that the end of the Nazi Holocaust in Lithuania was not the end of the Lithuanian one. Lithuanian violence against Jews continued after that date — and the Berelovitz family was dynamited over a year later. For a Jewish citizen to visit a military cemetery on May 9 Victory Day and mourn his family’s losses is not a provocation. It is an act of remembrance. Lithuania chose to treat it as a crime. Fridman now faces prosecution under Case No. 02-2-00512-24 for the historical questions he posted on Facebook that day.

As Michael Kretzmer has argued, the prosecution was intended to silence — but instead created a documentary exhibit of state antisemitism. The indictment does not allege that Fridman stated a factual falsehood. It argues that his statement contradicts the conclusions of a state institution — and that this contradiction itself constitutes the offense.

The hypocrisy is structural. As I have documented, Lithuania in March 2026 demanded that a Polish municipality remove street names honoring Cardinal Gulbinowicz within one month, threatening legal action. Lithuania’s own doctrine: once disqualifying facts emerge about an honored figure, the authority is obliged to remove the honor. Lithuania applied that doctrine to a Polish cardinal. It has refused to apply it to its own Holocaust-linked canon. What Lithuania calls criminality in Fridman is, by its own conduct elsewhere, a civic obligation.

Grant Gochin filed approximately thirty legal actions in Lithuanian courts seeking examination of Holocaust-era archival evidence. Every case was dismissed on procedural grounds. Lithuania threatened Gochin with criminal and constitutional prosecution for exposing the truth about their national heroes.

The Berelovitz family survived the Nazis. They survived the war. They survived exile in the Soviet interior. They came home to Neishtot, to the house that was theirs, in the town where Jews had lived since the seventeenth century.

Lithuanians dynamited them in their sleep.

The Soviets punished the murderers.

Lithuania freed them.

The names of those murdered on the night of May 11–12, 1946: Nekha Berelovitz, Hanah Berelovitz, Asher Joselevitz, Mordehai Berelovitz. Shelomoh Berelovitz survived, badly injured. He had fought in the Red Army to liberate Lithuania from Nazi occupation.

The names of their murderers are not preserved in the Yizkor book. In modern Lithuania, men like them may well have been reclassified as patriots.

The synagogue of Neishtot, built in 1816, still stands. A plaque reads: “Here until June 22, 1941 was synagogue which was led by the world famous Rabbi J. M. Lesinas” (father of Los Angeles resident Dr. Benjamin Lesin). The building is abandoned. No Jews remain.

While the Soviets ruled Lithuania, they punished Lithuanians who murdered Jews. The moment Lithuania regained independence in 1990, the punishment stopped and the murderers were freed. In thirty-five years of sovereignty, Lithuania has not prosecuted a single Lithuanian for the murder of a single Jew. But it has prosecuted a Jew — for refusing to forget.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)