In April 2019, the chairs and recent chairs of the expert working groups and committees of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance issued a statement of grave concern about a single Member Country. They named the institution. They named the historical figure. They named the documentary record the institution was contradicting. They named the distortion standard.

The statement is still on IHRA’s website. Seven years later, the record it identified has not been cured. What has changed is worse: Lithuania has moved from refusing to cure the state-memory problem IHRA identified in 2019 to prosecuting a Jewish citizen for challenging the same machinery of criminalized memory.

The violation is no longer the 2019 distortion. It is the refusal to cure after IHRA notice.

Why now? Because Lithuania has again been given direct notice. A pre-submission notice has been transmitted to Lithuanian diplomatic, governmental, historical, and communal recipients. Lithuania has been asked to answer before a protective filing proceeds. The questions are not theatrical. They are the questions any IHRA Member Country committed to Holocaust truth should be able to answer. Did Lithuania ever formally answer IHRA’s 2019 statement? Does it dispute the Noreika orders? Does LGGRTC still rely on its rescuer theory? Has LGGRTC supplied or shaped evidence in the Fridman prosecution? Does Lithuania distinguish Holocaust denial from criticism of collaborators it chooses to honor?

What IHRA Said in 2019

The signatories were not outside critics. They were the chairs and recent chairs of IHRA’s own expert working groups and committees, the people the Alliance itself appoints to help define what Holocaust distortion is and is not.

They addressed the Lithuanian Genocide and Resistance Research Centre, the LGGRTC, by name. They addressed Jonas Noreika by name. They wrote that documentary sources indicated Noreika had a key role in the ghettoization and expropriation of Jews in the Šiauliai district in 1941. They criticized LGGRTC’s continued public framing of Noreika as a rescuer without evidence of his direct role in rescue activity. They stated that Noreika’s later anti-Soviet resistance did not prove innocence during the Holocaust years.

Then they tied the matter directly to IHRA’s Working Definition of Holocaust Denial and Distortion. That definition identifies intentional efforts to excuse or minimize the Holocaust or its principal elements, including collaborators and allies of Nazi Germany, as Holocaust distortion.

This was not a casual disagreement with a Lithuanian historical interpretation. It was an application of IHRA’s own anti-distortion standard to the conduct of a Member Country’s state historical institution. In the diplomatic language of a consensus organization, the 2019 statement was severe.

That was the warning. The evidentiary sequence is a matter of public record:

Claim: LGGRTC maintains a public narrative framing Jonas Noreika as a rescuer.

Record: Jonas Noreika signed archival orders regarding the ghettoization and expropriation of Jews in the Šiauliai district.

Contradiction:........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)