A group of Israeli rabbis visiting Lithuania were spat on in a downtown street earlier this month in an antisemitic attack that went viral.
The July 6 assault in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius was posted online by the attacker, who encouraged others to target Jews in the same way.
The assailant, who was subsequently detained by local authorities following a public complaint made via Israeli officials, has been released ahead of his trial.
“I am not astonished and worry that he is not the only one,” Faina Kukliansky, chair of the Lithuanian Jewish Community, told JNS on Sunday. “I do not want to be chair of a Jewish organization in a country where Jews are attacked and have to fight antisemitism openly.”
She said that it was the responsibility of the authorities, who acted swiftly in the case, to crack down on such hate crimes by imposing a stiff sentence as a deterrent to others.
The rabbis, who had been traveling through Lithuania after visiting Jewish heritage sites in Belarus, quickly exited the country.
“The recent spate of anti-Semitic incidents in Vilnius is unacceptable,” Rabbi Yehuda Kaploun, U.S. special envoy to combat and monitor antisemitism, tweeted on X last week. “I thank local authorities for their swift response.”
“For the last 50 years, we lived in a golden age in the Diaspora and forgot that people don’t like Jews,” Shimon Cohen, a London-based senior adviser to the Conference of European Rabbis, told JNS on Sunday. “In fact, with its history, it would come as a surprise to me if there was no antisemitism in Lithuania.”
The former Soviet Republic, which joined the E.U. in 2004, had an extensive record of complicity in the Holocaust, when about 95% of the country’s Jewish population was murdered, one of the highest rate of destruction in the Shoah.
Several thousand Jews live in Lithuania today.
The Baltic country is a strong supporter of Israel within the European Union.
