Some of the media coverage to date at:

AFTER THE EVENT:  JTA;  15min.lt;  Alfa.lt;  Balsas.lt;  Delfi.lt;  FB;  Info.smi; Interfax;  Lrt.lt (+video); Lrytas.lt;  Obzor;  Simon Wiesenthal Center;  Stormfront;  RUN-UP TO THE EVENT: i24; Defending History (+correspondence with mayor’s office).

It gives us great honour to invite you to a special teleconference discussion between Jewish leaders from Europe and Mr. Naftali Bennett, Israel’s Minister for Diaspora Affairs, to be held: Tuesday 17th February, 2015, at 18:00 Israel time.

This discussion follows the horrific terror attack on a Synagogue in Copenhagen and in light of the growing threats facing Jewish communities in Europe from rising anti-Semitism and Islamic terrorists.

Interior minister decries ‘despicable act’; prime minister calls attack ‘anti-Semitic and ignoble’

PARIS — France’s interior minister said Sunday several hundred tombs had been defaced at a Jewish cemetery in the east of the country, in what he called “a despicable act.

Below, (1) the text of DH’s letter to the mayor of Kaunas, (2) the response received today from his office, and (3) our further response, in connection with the annual neo-Nazi march planned for 16 February 2015 in central Kaunas. See also section on previous marches, and our 3 February 2014 correspondence with the Kaunas police. Note that a banner featuring a major Kaunas Holocaust collaborator, the Nazi puppet prime minister Juozas Ambrazevicius Brazaitis (reburied with full honors as a hero in Kaunas, in 2012), is depicted in a 2014 photograph used by the march’s organizers to advertise the 2015 event.

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From: Dovid Katz
To: “meras@kaunas.lt”
Sent: Tuesday, February 3, 2015 12:28 PM
Subject: For the Honourable Mayor of Kaunas Andrius Kupčinskas
Dear Mayor Kupčinskas

I had the honor and pleasure of meeting with you at various memorial events in Kaunas in recent years.

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Israel’s first ambassador residing in Vilnius, Amir Maimon, says Lithuania should be more active in inviting tourists from his country and step up cooperation in the fields of defence and high technologies.
“Even it is very grey outside, you have a beautiful country. But I feel and sense that the average Israeli still didn’t discover Lithuania. And it will be for your side to take the necessary actions and promotion in order to attract more and more Israelis to come. Lithuania is not just Paneriai or the ghetto here in Vilnius. You have a lot to offer, but you need to ask yourself what can you do in order to be attractive to Israelis. The Israelis are well–known for their adventure characters. They like travelling, they like to discover new places,” the ambassador told BNS.

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by Julius Norwilla

This year much of the world commemorates the seventieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945. The day of its liberation, January 27th, is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. To mark the day this year, on the 26th of January, the Jewish Community of Lithuania organized three events, as reported in Defending History.

The final event of the day was the book launch for The Šiauliai Ghetto featuring as sole announced speaker its author, Dr. Arūnas Bubnys, director of the Genocide and Resistance Research Department of the Genocide and Resistance Research Center of Lithuania; for a critical view of the Genocide Center, as it is known for short, see Defending History’s page and news section on the institution.

There were about eighty people in the community’s elegant Yasha Heifetz Hall, mostly people from today’s Vilnius Jewish community. Among them were a number who have a very personal relationship towards the Šiauliai Ghetto: their family roots are in this city and its region, known in Yiddish and Jewish culture as Shavl. Many have lost most of their families in the Holocaust.

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A unique Vilnius Jewish archive, which was scattered during the Holocaust, will be revived in a virtual library in a few years.
In January, the Lithuanian Central State Archive started preserving the documents collected by the Jewish scientific YIVO institute that operated in Vilnius between the two world wars to be able to later digitize them and upload on a special database on the Jewish life in Eastern Europe.

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It is not surprising that experienced journalists and politicians as well as leaders of well-known Jewish institutions, who are following Ms. Kukliansky‘s activities devoted to expose Nazi criminals as well as to fight Neo-Nazism, were left in a complete state of confusion after reading Mr. Zuroff ‘s so called protest .

 Perhaps it is much easier to simply demonize some small country‘s even smaller institution, unjustly accuse chair of local Jewish community and exalt her deceased predecessor than to engage in any kind scientific research or a civilized discussion.

Mr. Zuroff, as it shows in his letters (here and here) of January 28 addressed to Ms. Kukliansky, was extremely quick to judge the cooperation between Jewish Community and Genocide Center. While the Jewish Community and Genocide Center certainly do not agree on some issues, the recent cooperation between the two institutions has brought some positive results:

Editor’s note: These nine Lithuanian poems by Aleksandras Bosas (1951—2014) were chosen by Milan Chersonski, translated by Ieva Pukelytė-Mikutienė and edited by Stanley H. Barkan, director of Cross-Cultural Communications Press. Sincerest thanks to them all.

During his last days, Aleksandras Bosas, in addition to writing poems protesting the falsification of the Holocaust in his native land, participated in one demonstration in Ukmergė against a city-square monument that honors a local Holocaust perpetrator as “national hero” and another in Kaunas protesting the glorification of the 1941 “Lithuanian Activist Front” murderers of Jewish civilians across the land.

More at defendinghistory.com