The chief rabbi of Lithuania and Vilnius, Chaim Burshtein, has issued an appeal to halt the excavation of human remains at a Holocaust-era mass grave site that was discovered last week during road construction in Šiauliai, in northern Lithuania.
“I refer to the humiliation of the excavation of the human remains of hundreds of people from the Holocaust-era mass-murder grave uncovered this week,” he wrote in a statement issued Tuesday by his office and sent to municipal and other officials. “Please halt all disturbance and moving of these human remains.”
The Lithuanian Tribune (Delfi) English language news site stated that a commission at the Šiauliai municipality had decided on Monday to excavate the site.
“It’s been decided to excavate the remains, do anthropological tests and then rebury them and also mark this place,” it quoted archaeologist Audronė Šapaitė, who is in charge of the investigation, as telling the Baltic News Service (BNS).
The article quoted her as saying that the remains of some 40 people were found at the burial site and that about 700 people were believed to have been shot dead by the Nazis and buried there, and that it “remains to be seen” whether attempts will be made to locate the other burials. It quoted her as saying that those buried there included “prisoners of various nationalities.”
She was quoted as saying further construction would continue, and it was not decided where to rebury the remains that have been uncovered.
In his statement, Rabbi Burshtein called for an immediate halt to the road work, saying that the remains must not be disturbed.
In accordance with Halacha — Jewish Law — and indeed, common human values of all humankind, and the ethical standards of the European Union, the people murdered by the Nazis deserve to be left intact where they perished. The claim that the grave included non-Jewish people cannot in any way justify destruction of their grave.
I ask you to immediately halt the works underway to disturb and move the remains of these hundreds of victims of the Lithuanian Holocaust, and to preserve the grave precisely where it stands. Thank you.
Scholar Dovid Katz, who reprinted Burshtein’s statement on his web site devoted to Lithuanian Jewish issues, wrote that local and regional media had reported widely on the discovery of the mass grave and that some media had published “photos of skulls, bones and other remains from the mass grave being dismantled, sometimes including shoes and clothing.”