A group of protestors gather at the Office of the President in Vilnius Thursday to protest the formation of a new government with a candidate from the Nemuno Aušra party proposed for minister of culture.

Ignotas Adomavičius has been put forward by Remigijus Žemaitaitis’s Nemuno Aušra party as a new government coalesces following real estate scandal which enveloped Gintautas Paluckas’s ruling coalition earlier this year. Žemaitaitis rose to prominence in early 2023 by making a series of facebook and other posts questioning the Holocaust in Lithuania and criticizing Jews and Israel. Lithuania’s Constitutional Court found his statements were a violation of his oath to uphold the Lithuanian constitution as a member of parliament. The comments have been widely recognized as anti-Semitic.

Adomavičius has been described as a pasta maker, whether that’s a hobby or a profession, and a graduate of an art school in Vilnius. In Lithuanian pasta is called macaroni, a synonym for nonsense He told Lithuanian state radio and television one of his priorities as culture minister will be to rebuild the “Old Synagogue,” presumably meaning the Great Synagogue in Vilnius, whose reconstruction no Jewish or Lithuanian heritage group is seeking currently. There was talk of this in the early 2000s by Lithuanian government officials, but the idea was rejected by the various Lithuanian Jewish communities at the time as a boondoggle without a congregation to serve. Jewish reporter and newspaper editor Milan Cheronskis called the proposal one for a Jewish Disneyland in Vilnius. Lithuanian state radio and television interview in Lithuanian here.