On Passover, Jews recite Dayenu — a hymn of cumulative gratitude. Had God only brought us out of Egypt but not split the sea, it would have been enough. Had God only split the sea but not sustained us in the desert, it would have been enough. Each act of divine intervention is declared independently sufficient. The hymn escalates through fifteen stages, and at each stage the congregation affirms: dayenu — it would have been enough.

The structure of Dayenu is not ornamental. It is logical. It teaches that the case for gratitude does not depend on any single act. Each act alone meets the threshold. The accumulation is not required to make the argument. It is required to make the argument undeniable.

That same logic applies in reverse.

What follows is a factual recitation of Lithuanian state conduct regarding the Holocaust and its memory. Each item, standing alone, would be sufficient to demonstrate institutional falsification. Together, they form a pattern so consistent, so sustained, and so well-documented that denial requires either ignorance or complicity.

This is addressed to Lithuanian readers as much as to Jewish ones. Lithuanians who encounter this list should ask a simple question at each stage: if this single item were the only thing Lithuania had done, would it be defensible? If the answer is no at any point, then the accumulation is not a matter of interpretation. It is a matter of record.

Lithuania replaced the word “murdered” with “perished” and “lost” in its official treatment of the Holocaust.

Lithuania renamed its perpetrators “collaborators,” a term that assigns primary agency to Germany and reduces Lithuanian killers to subordinate participants in someone else’s crime.

Lithuania equated the Holocaust with Soviet repression through the genocide equalization doctrine, converting a program of total annihilation into one half of a symmetrical national tragedy.

Lithuania embedded that equalization in law by assigning a single institution — the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania — joint authority over both Soviet repression and the Holocaust, ensuring that the murder of Jews would be administratively managed by the same body that commemorates Lithuanian national suffering.

Lithuania declared Jonas Noreika a national hero. His signature appears on documents directing Jews into ghettos. When his granddaughter petitioned to remove the honor, Lithuanian courts refused.

Lithuania claimed that Juozas Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis, head of the 1941 Provisional Government under whose authority mass murder was initiated, had been exonerated by American intelligence.

United States Congressman Brad Sherman wrote multiple letters to Lithuanian officials exposing that claimed American exoneration as fabricated. Lithuania did not retract the claim.

Lithuania opened criminal investigations against elderly Jewish partisans — survivors who had fought against the forces that murdered their families — while those who carried out the murders remained honored.

Lithuania deployed the narratives of Righteous Gentiles not as evidence of individual moral courage but as institutional defense against accountability for the perpetrators from whom those Righteous Gentiles were rescuing Jews.

Lithuania investigated, marginalized, or publicly attacked researchers and witnesses who challenged the state narrative of the Holocaust.

The LGGRTC — Lithuania’s designated authority on Holocaust memory — operated with a documented institutional methodology: converting genocide into “context,” perpetrators into “freedom fighters,” and evidence into “balanced debate.” The institution was not failing at its mission. It was succeeding at a different one.

Lithuania, in 2026, placed its new antisemitism and Holocaust-memory “Action Plan” under the administrative authority of that same LGGRTC — the institution whose documented methodology of falsification the plan was ostensibly designed to correct.

Any one of these, alone, would be enough.

A Lithuanian reader may object that this list lacks context. That each item has an explanation. That language choices reflect diplomatic convention. That the genocide equalization doctrine addresses real Soviet crimes. That honoring national figures is complicated. That the LGGRTC has undergone reform.

These objections are the context.

Every item on this list has been defended, explained, qualified, and contextualized by Lithuanian officials for decades. That is the point. The pattern is not a series of isolated mistakes corrected upon discovery. It is a sustained institutional program in which each new explanation serves the same function: to prevent plain acknowledgment that Lithuanians murdered Jews, that the Lithuanian state has falsified that record, and that it continues to do so.

The Dayenu structure exists to make a single argument: sufficiency at every stage. The case does not depend on the final item. It does not depend on the worst item. It does not require the reader to accept all twelve. Any one is enough.

Passover commands Jews to tell the truth about what happened. Not a curated truth. Not a balanced truth. Not a truth softened by diplomatic interest or institutional access. The truth.

At the seder, Jews are commanded to remember the persecution of the Pharaohs and to tell their children. That obligation does not end at Egypt. Jews are equally commanded to remember the near-total annihilation of Lithuanian Jewry — 96% of a civilization murdered — and to tell that truth with the same clarity, the same directness, and the same refusal to soften it for the comfort of those who committed it.

Lithuanian Jews were not “lost.” They were murdered. The people who murdered them were not “collaborators.” They were killers. The seder demands that we name the oppressor. It demands that we teach our children who did this, how it was done, and how the truth was buried afterward. It demands that the next generation inherits not comfort but obligation.

That obligation falls on Jewish leadership first.

Any Jewish leader who hosts a Lithuanian representative and permits the word “lost” to describe murdered Jews is not serving the Jewish people. Any Jewish leader who allows the word “collaborators” to replace the word “killers” in a Jewish space is not preserving Jewish memory. That person is in service to Lithuania.

Passover is the season in which Jews decide whom they serve: the truth, or those who falsify it.

The Pharaohs enslaved us. The Lithuanians murdered us. We are commanded to remember both, to name both, and to ensure our children never forget either.

That is what Dayenu demands.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)