Lithuania – Tisha B’Av in Vilnius: Swastikas Sprayed on Jewish Building

Lithuania – “Jews get out,” said the graffiti found by Israelis on Sunday, on the wall of the Jewish community center in Vilnius, Lithuania.

The building, in which Judaism is taught, and the community’s museum adjacent to it, were both covered in swastikas, a Star of David on which a hanging man was depicted, and drawings of concentration camps besides the awful inscription.

Twenty-five-year old Daniel Kirshner from Jerusalem is residing in the city. He told Ynet about what he had seen. “We were walking in the Jewish quarter and suddenly we saw this. Our first thought was that we were back in 1934,” he said.

He added that he was surprised at the locals’ indifference to the spectacle. “It seems no one here is making a big deal out of it. The guard at the center said he hadn’t seen a thing and that it must have happened during the night. They don’t have a clue who did it, but I myself saw a gang of skinheads lurking nearby. Maybe it has something to do with them,” he said.

Kirshner is in town for the opening of a tourist agency he plans to run from Israel with the help of a Jewish colleague living in the city. He claims that the fact that the graffiti was sprayed on the eve of Tisha B’Av is not a coincidence. “I think that the fact that it happened on Tisha B’Av is symbolic,” he said. “They knew exactly when and where to do it. In any case the community has no plans of taking it off, so that everyone can see what’s happening.”

Kirshner was shocked at the anti-Semitic expressions in Vilnius. “According to my knowledge there is not much anti-Semitism here, except for the annual Nazi parade on March 16, but it’s coordinated with the police,” he said. “My colleague is as surprised as I am.”

One month ago a similar case was reported in Berlin, when police announced they had arrested a man suspected of spraying anti-Semitic slurs on a Holocaust memorial in the German capital. The man, of eastern German origin, was accused of spraying “words and symbols, some of which have anti-Semitic meaning” on four stone slabs belonging to the memorial, according to police reports.