Eastern Europe
The Lithuanian Jewish Community said on its website that the graffiti “is the latest in a series of acts of anti-Semitic vandalism of Jewish sites and statues in Vilnius and Lithuania.”
They sat on two Jewish communal boards and were given the 2019 Chovevei Zion (“Lovers of Zion”) Award from NCYI.
“Memories need to have their own home,” said local professor Simon Vrusho, who opened the small museum in 2018.
A small but intransigent film team is working to reveal that “national memorials to murderers lie feet away from the graves of their victims. The glorification of so-called war ‘heroes’ with Jewish blood on their hands is in full swing across the Baltic States.”
“We want the children to be proud of being Jewish. In order to be proud, they have to know what they’re proud of, and why,” said philanthropist Ronald S. Lauder.
“It’s like putting a monument to killers on the top of the graves of their victims,” said director general of the Ukrainian Jewish Committee Eduard Dolinsky.
The Jewish Community of Lithuania called for the removal of a new plaque that has replaced the one they and the Simon Wiesenthal Center have lobbied for years to have removed.
The Odessa festivities, designed to encourage potential candidates to sign up for a trip to Israel, was the largest Birthright gathering ever to take place outside the Jewish state.
These Righteous Gentiles, who range in age from the early 80s to 100, are dwindling in attendance at the annual event in their honor.
Speaking with “Israel Hayom” on the 80th anniversary of the outbreak of World War II, Andrzej Duda calls it “the most tragic day in the history of the Polish nation.” Regarding reparations, he says the issue “concerns all those who lost property, irrespective of their nationality.”
About 300 people attended the reopening of the Wooden Synagogue, or Lemnaria Synagogue, which was founded in 1835 and seized in 1940.
After alleged corruption halted construction of a planned Jewish complex in the city, a group stepped in to ask Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for assistance.
