Vilnius – President Promises ‘Litvaks’ Restitution to Holocaust Survivors

Vilnius, Lithuania – President Dalia Grybauskaite promised descendants of the country’s Jewish community that they would receive restitution Monday.

Addressing an international congress of ‘Litvaks’ – as Lithuania’s Jews are known – in Vilnius, Grybauskaite said the Baltic state had spent the 20 years since it regained its independence from the Soviet Union trying to correct ‘historical errors’ that saw Jews dispossessed of their property and other assets when their community was almost entirely destroyed during World War II.

‘This autumn the government and parliament will consider a Restoration of Property Act. I am very glad that a historical injustice which was not (perpetrated) in today’s Lithuania, will be corrected, and you’ll get justice,’ she told delegates at the Third World Litvak Congress.

Secretary General of the World Jewish Congress Michael Schneider said restitution would be welcome and was badly needed.

‘The reason that we are pressing for restitution is certainly not to revenge what happened in the past … The money needs to be used in order to rebuild the Lithuanian Jewish society and also to help those people who survived the Holocaust,’ he told a press conference.

Israeli Minister of Information and Diaspora Yuli Edelstein told the conference restitution issues needed to be brought to a swift conclusion.

‘The population of needy Holocaust survivors is old and rapidly passing away. Therefore whatever can be done to help them and future Jewish generations must be done now,’ he said.

From the 13th Century onwards, Litvaks played a central role in the life of Vilnius, eventually accounting for nearly half of the population and earning Vilnius a reputation as the ‘Jerusalem of Lithuania’ and a centre of Jewish scholarship with more than 100 synagogues.

During some of the most brutal scenes of the Holocaust following the Nazi invasion of 1941, German troops and local collaborators virtually wiped out the Jewish population.

At Paneriai, just outside Vilnius, around 70,000 Jews were killed and only 4,000 survived from a pre-war population of around 150,000.

Lithuania’s attempts to reconcile the Jewish past remain problematic. Jewish organisations have objected to plans to build on top of a former Jewish cemetery and have warned of a revival of anti- Semitism in all three Baltic states.