June 19




ISRAEL:

Israel to replace representative at Holocaust claims summit


Following complaints about conflicts of interest, the Foreign Ministry is
considering sending a minister to represent Israel at the Prague
conference on Holocaust assets, instead of a Claims Conference
representative.

Reuven Merhav had been expected to serve as Israel's top delegate to the
forum.

The June 26 Prague event will bring together delegates from 50 countries
to assess progress in recovering looted property. This is a follow-up to a
1998 Washington summit.

Currently, East European countries like Poland and Ukraine are refusing to
divulge compensation statistics for heirless Jewish property, which is
estimated to be worth tens of billions of dollars.

"Israel's position in Prague is unlike that of other countries," Deputy
Foreign Ministry Danny Ayalon told the Knesset plenum on Wednesday. "I
certainly am considering the option of appointing a minister to represent
Israel."

Merhav himself proposed that a minister lead Israel's 12-man team, Ayalon
said.

Ayalon was replying to a query by MK Zevulun Orlev, who said that while
Merhav was "a worthy man beyond reproach," his nomination was "a conflict
of interest."

Merhav currently holds a senior, non-salaried position with the Conference
on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, the world's richest restitution
body, which represents world Jewry in compensation talks with Germany.

The Claims Conference is currently under review by a parliamentary
committee of inquiry, over accusations that it has withheld funds from
survivors and heirs.

Politicians, prominent restitution figures and the Movement for Quality of
Government complained that Merhav's nomination could render heirs of Jews
who were murdered in the Holocaust "voiceless" at what may be the last
international conference on restitution, citing the Claims Conference's
"problematic record" in transferring funds to heirs.

The Claims Conference denies withholding funds from eligible heirs.

Ayalon noted that Merhav - a former Mossad and Foreign Ministry official -
was responsible for putting the issue of heirless property in Europe on
the agenda of the Prague Conference.

"The interests of the State of Israel and the Claims Conference are not
identical," Orlev said. "For example, the Claims Conference may be
concerned with commemoration, while Israel is focused on welfare," he told
Haaretz.

Ayalon said that the Ministry's legal department has found there was no
conflict of interest in Merhav's nomination.

"In my heart, I too have grievances with the Claims Conference," Ayalon
said. He also noted that "working together is a major interest for the
Claims Conference and Israel," and that the Prague Conference "could turn
over a new leaf in Israel's relationship" with the Claims Conference.

(source: Ha'aretz)







LITHUANIA:

Baltic Ghosts, Lithuania is investigating Jewish Holocaust survivors as
war criminals


Lithuania is investigating Jewish Holocaust survivors as war criminalsand
using their own memoirs as evidence against them.


Yitzhak Arad escaped to the forest at the age of 16, days before the Jews
in his native Lithuanian village were massacred. He is proud he joined the
Soviet partisans to fight the Nazis and their collaborators. For a Jew,
just to survive the Holocaust was a victory, he says; to tell about it was
an obligation. That's why Arad wrote his memoir, The Partisan: From the
Valley of Death to Mt. Zion, published in English in 1979.

The book is a raw account of an orphaned teenager fighting the Nazis in
desperate conditions after the murder of 40 members of his family. Arad
describes his main activities with the Soviet partisans as blowing up
German military trains, and he also details some of the grislier aspects
of forest warfare. In one passage, he describes a "punitive" action
against the village of Girdan, where two partisans had been killed: "We
broke into the village from two directions, and the defenders fled after
putting up feeble resistance. We took the residents out of several houses
in the section of the village where our two comrades fell and burned down
the houses. Never again were partisans fired on from their village."

"It was a cruel war," the 82-year-old Arad recalled recently. "We did the
best we could to survive." He dedicated his memoir to those who fought
with him and died along the way--his "heroic friends."

But when Lithuania's chief war crimes prosecutor, Rimvydas Valentukevicius,
read Arads book, nearly 30 years after its publication, he didn't see a
hero. He saw a possible war criminal. And in September 2007, when the
prosecutors office publicly announced an investigation into Arad, it was
clear The Partisan would be Exhibit A against him. More war crimes
investigations of Lithuanian Holocaust survivors have followed, and in
each case, memoirs are playing a central role.

These events are all the more shocking to those who remember that the
country was once a sort of Jewish promised land. Lithuanias capital,
Vilnius, was known as the "Jerusalem of the North." About one third of its
population in the 1920s and 30s was Jewish. Yiddish was in the air then.
Synagogues welcomed the faithful. Cafes overflowed with young Jewish
painters, writers, and poets. Vilna, as the city is called in Yiddish, was
the seat of intellectual, spiritual, and artistic life for Eastern
European Jewry.

All of that is long gone, destroyed by the Nazi war machine with the
active assistance, in a dark chapter for Lithuania, of many local
collaborators. Vilnius today has only one synagogue. Lithuania's once
flourishing community of more than 200,000 Jews--over 90 percent of whom
were annihilated during the war--is now about 4,000. All that is left are
the Holocaust survivors stories, and now those, in the case of Arad and
several others, are being used against them.

How a country that was once a center of Jewish life has now begun
targeting the few remaining victims of history's worst crime is a story of
foreign occupiers, former Jewish partisans, and modern-day Lithuanian
ethnic nationalists. But more broadly, it is a story of books, memory, and
a small country's ongoing struggle to make sense of its tangled, bloody
historical narratives--a struggle facing all of Eastern Europe.

In a strange twist, this whole affair began with a good-faith effort to
heal those deep, lingering ethnic divisions. In 1998, President Valdas
Adamkus created a high-level commission to try to establish the
"historical truth" about Lithuanias horrific occupations during the 20th
century: first by the Soviets from 1940-41, then by the Nazis from
1941-44, followed again by the Soviets from 1944-90. The commission
attracted a prestigious collection of international scholars, including
Arad, who had gone on to become a brigadier general in the Israel Defense
Forces and director of Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust remembrance center.
However, as the commission began excavating the layered narratives of
guilt and suffering from this period, ethnic tensions flared.

The biggest obstacle for Lithuanians in confronting their history is the
now well-established fact that hundreds, if not thousands, of Lithuanians
voluntarily participated in the Holocaust. Many of the country's Jews were
shot by local police and by a special unit of Lithuanian killers
incorporated into the Nazi SS. Since its independence in 1990, only three
Lithuanian collaborators have been charged with war crimes, and none was
punished.

"The genocide of the Jews is the bloodiest page in the country's history,"
said Saulius Suziedelis, a Lithuanian historian and member of the
presidential commission. "But for many Lithuanians," he said, "just to
mention that obvious fact turns them off because they want to talk about
their own victimization."

That victimization came during the brutal Soviet occupation. It was marked
by the repression of Lithuanian culture, the deportation of many thousands
of Lithuanians to Siberia, and the murder of Lithuanian independence
fighters. The Soviets strictly controlled information and wrote Lithuanias
history books. Today, as the country struggles to write its own narrative,
most Lithuanians see the Soviets as the real villains of World War II.
"The Spielberg view of the war is totally irrelevant to [Lithuanians]
because that was not their experience," Suziedelis said. Instead,
Lithuanian Jews, who allied with the Soviets to fight the Nazis, are
today often regarded as deserving of punishment for Soviet crimes.

This is certainly the view of many Lithuanian "ethno-nationalists,"
according to Antony Polonsky, professor of Holocaust studies at Brandeis
University. In 2006, after the presidential commission published interim
findings for a report that Polonsky called "a devastating account of the
Lithuanian involvement in the mass murder of the Jews," these firebrands
mobilized, he said. They took to the pink-tinted pages of the right-wing
Respublika newspaper--Lithuania's second-leading daily, which has been
sanctioned for running anti-Semitic material. Their target was Yitzhak
Arad. In an April 2006 article, Respublika published portions of his
memoir and denounced him as a murderer and war criminal. The following
month, Lithuanian prosecutors opened their investigation into Arad.

Some might dismiss this timing as coincidence. But not Rytas Narvydas,
head of special investigations for the Genocide and Resistance Research
Centre of Lithuania, which investigates and memorializes past state
crimes. He and the lead prosecutor, Valentukevicius, acknowledge that the
Arad investigation started in response to the Respublika article. When
asked whether anti-Semitic elements in Lithuania had manipulated the war
crimes prosecutors office, Narvydas conceded, "It does happen from time to
time."

Lithuanian Foreign Affairs Secretary Oskaras Jusys criticized the
prosecutor for getting pushed around by "outside" elements and said the
investigations never should have been opened. "The mistake was made by the
prosecutors office from the very beginning," he said. "Their mistake was
to go ahead without clear evidence."

The Arad case "created so much damage" for Lithuania, Jusys said,
referring to the significant diplomatic pressure imposed by the United
States, the European Union, Israel, and international Jewish groups.
Lithuania's foreign minister and president appealed personally to the
prosecutor to drop the Arad investigation, Jusys said, and in September
of last year the case was closed. But in the meantime, prosecutors had
opened investigations into several other Holocaust survivors. "We have
been able to clean one mess," Jusys said in frustration, "and now other
things are happening again."

The most public of the ongoing investigations involves Rachel Margolis,
an 87-year-old former biology professor living in Israel who joined the
Soviet partisans after escaping the Vilnius ghetto. Here, too, a book is
at the heart of the case. In Margolis's memoir, published in 2005 in
Polish (and later in Russian and German), she recounts a partisan raid on
the village of Kaniukai on January 29, 1944. Facts about the raid are
heavily disputed, including whether the villagers were acting in concert
with the Nazis, but the war crimes prosecutor alleges that 46 people were
murdered, 22 of them children.

According to Margolis's memoir, she did not take part in the Kaniukai
raid, but her longtime friend and fellow partisan, Fania Brancovskaja,
did. Now an 87-year-old librarian at the Vilnius Yiddish Institute,
Brancovskaja was attacked in print last year by the ultraright-wing
nationalist newspaper Lietuvos Aidas. It labeled her a murderer, called
on investigators to charge her with war crimes, and demanded they summon
Margolis as a witness. And, last May, Lithuanian prosecutors publicly
announced they were seeking to question the two women.

The heightened scrutiny of these investigations clearly frustrates
Valentukevicius, the prosecutor, as does having to defend himself against
accusations of anti-Semitism. When asked about it recently, he raised a
copy of Lithuanias procedural code and said he's just doing his
job--investigating all war crimes allegations as the law requires. But
with dozens of potential cases of Lithuanian collaboration yet to be
examined, the decision to focus on Jewish Soviet partisans has attracted
suspicion.

So has the very public nature of the prosecutor's investigation. Faina
Kukliansky, Brancovskaja's attorney and an ex-prosecutor, complained that
the former partisans are being tried by "innuendo" in the court of public
opinion because prosecutors lack any evidence to try them in a court of
law. "Everything has been done with a wink and a nod," she said.

Many critics agree and say it is no coincidence that nationalists sought
out Margoliss memoir, a light seller at best. Prior to its publication,
Margolis had detailed aspects of Lithuania's history that many would
rather ignore. She helped publish works on the Holocaust, including the
diary of Kazimierz Sakowicz, a searing account of the heavy participation
of Lithuanians in the murder of 50,000 to 60,000 Jews in the Ponary forest
outside Vilnius. The 2005 English edition of the book, for which Margolis
wrote the foreword, was edited by Yitzhak Arad.

Margolis has not returned to Lithuania since prosecutors came looking for
her. Brancovskaja met with prosecutors last May to explain that she was
recovering from an operation at the time of the Kaniukai raid and had not
taken part in it. Margolis sent her old friend a letter backing up
Brancovskajas account, and said her memoir should be regarded as
literature, not historical fact. That may be true of all memoirs, but the
distinction takes on a special significance in the context of the
Holocaust, where survivors write to bear witness and deniers have long
seized on small inconsistencies to discount the larger event.

For his part, Arad stands by the accuracy of his account as vehemently as
he denies committing any war crimes. "I am proud of what I did during the
wartime," he said. "If I would feel I did something not to do, I wouldn't
write a memoir."

As during the Arad affair, the world is watching Lithuania's
investigations of the elderly Jews who fought with the Soviet partisans,
and Brancovskaja and the others will likely escape war crimes charges.
But charges may never have been the point. The prosecutor's simple act of
initiating the Arad investigation was enough to derail the half of the
presidential commission researching Nazi crimes and Lithuanian complicity
in them. It has not published anything since 2006. This may be the
investigation's most enduring harm.

"You have to do what's right, not what's easy," said David Crane, a law
professor at Syracuse University and founding chief prosecutor for the
U.N. war crimes court in Sierra Leone. "Some people in society may not
want these things found, and in the short term, that may seem like a
solution. But in the long term, 25 years from now, theyll still be
arguing about this."

Other consequences are more personal. The relationship between
Brancovskaja and Margolis, a friendship that started before the war, has
suffered. The two women have been divided by a 65-year-old memory and a
passage in a book. "It is very painful what they are doing," Brancovskaja
said, sitting in the Yiddish library surrounded by the many volumes she
tends. But then she added, "I have lived through so much. This is not the
worst."

(source: Daily PK)