During a visit to Israel this week, Lithuania’s prime minister pledged that all Jewish cemeteries Lithuania would be “memorialized and marked” by 2017.
“Let me reassure you that the history of Lithuanian Jews and [their] memorials are very important to the Lithuanian people and the Lithuanian government, and the government adopted a special program to make sure that all cemeteries in all municipalities in Lithuania will be memorialized and marked by 2017,” Prime Minister Algirdas Butkevicius said in a speech before the Israel Council on Foreign Relations (ICFR) and the World Jewish Congress (WJC) in Jerusalem.
It was not clear just what that meant. There are believed to be at least 200 Jewish cemeteries in Lithuania, and also about 200 World War II mass grave sites.
According to the Baltic News Service (BNS), Butkevicius also said that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu posed no objections to a controversial state-funded project to renovate and rebuild a derelict sports center on the site of Vilnius’s Old Šnipiškės Jewish Cemetery and turn it into a congress center.
BNS quoted Butkevicius as saying he had briefed Netanyahu on the government’s plans for the cemetery site.
“No, he gave no critical remarks whatsoever – the prime minister said he had recently received the information and was fully familiar with it,” BNS quoted Butkevicius as saying in a telephone interview from Jerusalem on Tuesday. “II said we wanted to get this done and would not make any decisions or start any tasks before prior agreement with the Jewish Community of Lithuania or the international organization for preservation of Jewish cemeteries that had come to Lithuania. He was clear – this is very good.”
Read the Baltic News Agency Story
Read World Jewish Congress report
Read a summary of the controversy surrounding the Šnipiškės cemetery project
See information on Jewish cemeteries at the Maceva Jewish cemetery project web site