Silvia Foti Nominated for Nobel Peace Prize

Silvia Foti Nominated for Nobel Peace Prize

According to a blog post by Grant Gochin in the blog section of the Times of Israel internet site, Jonas Noreika’s granddaughter Silvia Foti has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2023.

Although the Nobel Prize committee has historically refused to release the names of nominees for 50 years, according to Gochin’s blog post:

“[Former Beverly Hills] mayor [and current Council Member John] Mirish proudly announced that Silvia Foti has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Foti is the granddaughter of an apex mass genocidal murderer of Jews in Lithuania, Jonas Noreika. She bravely exposed her grandfather’s crimes and Holocaust fraud by the government of Lithuania. Foti is the first non-Jewish Lithuanian in history ever to be nominated for the most prestigious peace prize in the world.”

If selected for the prestigious recognition, Foti would joint earlier female writers who received the prize including indigenous Guatemalan Rigoberta Menchu who won the Nobel peace prize in 1998, Belarus’s Svetlana Alexandrovna Alexievich who won the prize in literature in 2015 and 2018 peace prize recipient Nadia Murad Basee Taha, the Yezidi human rights activist from Iraq.

Silvia Foti has written an extensive biography detailing her grandfather’s Nazi activities during the Holocaust in Lithuania published in English and Lithuanian.

Grant Gochin’s blog post with an interesting story about the Lithuanian consul in Los Angeles here.