Authorities in Lithuania have not placed special protection on the country’s Jewish institutions despite three threats last month to attack them, a leader of the country’s Jewish community told JNS on Sunday.
The death threats led to meetings between community bosses and security officials, Faina Kukliansky, chairwoman of the Jewish Community of Lithuania, said, but “until now we do not receive any security service from the state.” The community’s new kosher restaurant, which is scheduled to open its doors this month, is also unprotected, she said. “Let us hope that HaShem [God] protects us,” she said.
The threats, which emerged on Oct. 10, were “to blow up a synagogue and kill Jews,” Kukliansky said.
JNS contacted the Lithuanian Interior Ministry on Sunday with a query about the investigation into the threats, and about the security situation following them. The ministry’s spokesperson did not reply by press time.
About 5,000 Jews live in Lithuania, according to the community. The London-based Institute for Jewish Policy Research, which has performed demographic analyses of European Jewry since 2020, estimates that the Baltic country has only 2,100 people who identify as Jewish.
Lithuania has four functioning synagogues—two in Vilnius, one in Kaunas and one in Klaipeda, according to the European Jewish Congress.
Lithuania was a hub of Jewish thought and culture for centuries before the Holocaust. It had 168,000 Jews before the genocide, according to the Yad Vashem museum, of whom 141,000 were murdered by the Germans and local collaborators.
