AJC and Lithuania
Agents of the East, Jews, and Stupid People
Artur Fridman is the reason this article cannot wait.
Lithuania is prosecuting a Jewish citizen under its historical-speech statute after he visited Antakalnis Cemetery in Vilnius to honor his grandfather, Aron Fridman, a Jewish soldier who fought Nazi Germany in the Red Army. Fridman then posted on Facebook praising those who fought fascism and questioning Lithuania’s heroization of Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas. Lithuania responded with a criminal case. The publicly available file identifies Criminal Case No. 02-2-00512-24, with charges under Article 170² §1 and Article 313 §2 of the Lithuanian Criminal Code. The pre-trial materials run to 220 pages.
A European Union and NATO member state is prosecuting a Jew for speech about state memory while presenting itself internationally as a partner against antisemitism. That contradiction should have stopped the performance. It did not.
Lithuania did not suddenly find Jewish institutional partners. It has long cultivated them. The American Jewish Committee is the most obvious example. The issue is not that AJC speaks with Lithuania. Jewish institutions may speak with governments. The issue is that Lithuania has treated AJC as a preferred Jewish institutional partner while leaving the underlying Holocaust-memory record unresolved.
This article is written to lay out a case. I am not asking Jewish institutions to become enemies of Lithuania. I am asking them not to let Lithuania use Jewish institutional proximity as a substitute for answering the record.
This article is based on the public record. I have no way to determine what goes on behind closed doors between AJC and Lithuania. I cannot evaluate private assurances, private objections, private discomfort, or private diplomacy. I can evaluate only what Lithuania publishes, what AJC publishes, what appears in public photographs and public statements, and what remains unanswered in the documentary record. On that record, Lithuania has repeatedly used AJC proximity to project credibility while the underlying Holocaust-memory file remains unresolved.
This article will be sent to Rabbi Andrew Baker. AJC presumes to operate in a field that includes my murdered family, my ancestry, my litigation record, and my decades of public work. Yet AJC has not treated me as someone entitled to communication, consultation, or even a response. As a vested party, my perception is that AJC and I are on opposite sides in this memory war. It is not a conclusion I wanted. It is the conclusion the public record has forced on me.
Readers who want the full historical record can review my archive on Substack and my articles at the Times of Israel. This article is not an attempt to repeat all that material. It is an attempt to state why AJC’s role now has to be addressed directly.
Withdrawal of Consent
As a prominent Litvak with a long public record of engagement on Lithuanian Jewish issues, I withdraw consent for AJC to imply that it speaks for me on Lithuanian Holocaust accountability. AJC may speak for itself, its leadership, its donors, and its institutional constituency. It may not imply that it speaks broadly for Litvaks, Litvak descendants, murdered Lithuanian Jewry, or those of us who have spent decades building the public record Lithuania still refuses to answer. If AJC engages Lithuania on Lithuanian Jewish issues, it must specifically exclude me from any claimed communal mandate.
I also insist that AJC state that limitation at any meeting it has on the Lithuanian issue. If AJC speaks about Lithuania, it should make clear that it does not speak for me, that it does not represent my consent, and that it does not carry a general Litvak mandate. There is to be no implication that AJC speaks broadly for anything other than its own constituency.
I cannot explain AJC’s motives without speculating, and speculation would weaken the case. But I can say this: as a Jew, as a Litvak descendant, and as someone opposed to antisemitism, I cannot understand why AJC keeps appearing beside Lithuania while Lithuania prosecutes Fridman, leaves the LGGRTC record unretracted, and markets itself as a partner against antisemitism.
AJC Inside Lithuania’s Western Legitimacy Story
The AJC-Lithuania relationship did not begin with the 157-measure Action Plan. Lithuania itself has placed AJC inside its independence, NATO, and Euro-Atlantic story. In 2018, Lithuania’s Foreign Ministry reported that AJC was “the first Jewish organization to speak in favour of the recognition of Lithuania’s independence and the development of NATO.” The Ministry made that statement when Foreign Minister Linas Linkevičius met AJC CEO David Harris in Vilnius. That description was Lithuania’s own account of the relationship, not my characterization. It placed AJC inside Lithuania’s independence and NATO narrative.
The point is not merely historical courtesy. Lithuania’s government publicly described AJC as a Jewish institutional ally in Lithuania’s Western integration. Later, Lithuania’s Foreign Ministry again thanked AJC for “consistent support” of Lithuania’s independence and Euro-Atlantic integration. That is Lithuania’s own public record of institutional dependency, gratitude, and continuity.
That matters because Lithuania now asks Jewish institutions to treat its antisemitism policy as credible while the same state has never corrected the historical-memory record that Litvak descendants and independent historians have spent years documenting. A relationship that once helped Lithuania join the Western club is now being used to help Lithuania remain credible inside Jewish memory politics.
AJC also publicly welcomed Lithuania’s adoption of the IHRA working definition of antisemitism. In January 2018, AJC praised Lithuania’s endorsement of the definition and stated that an AJC delegation had discussed the possibility with Lithuanian officials during a visit to Vilnius. The problem is not the definition. The problem is that Lithuania adopted the language of antisemitism awareness while retaining the apparatus of Holocaust distortion.
IHRA’s own expert chairs later publicly condemned LGGRTC. In April 2019, the IHRA expert chairs issued a joint statement expressing grave concern over LGGRTC’s justification of Noreika’s wartime actions toward Jews. Lithuania’s IHRA membership did not protect LGGRTC from IHRA itself.
Lithuania’s own Presidential International Commission also contradicted LGGRTC. On April 11, 2019, the Commission issued a response to LGGRTC’s Noreika statement and restated its objection to attempts to minimize the role of the Šiauliai district chief in the persecution and murder of Jews. This was not merely a dispute between me and Lithuania. Lithuania’s own commission and IHRA-linked experts had rejected the state historical institution’s line.
Lithuania accepted IHRA’s vocabulary while preserving the institution that IHRA’s expert chairs publicly condemned. AJC praised the vocabulary. AJC did not address the institution.
Decorations, Proximity, and the Question of Mandate
Lithuania did not merely meet AJC. Lithuania decorated AJC leaders. Those honors matter because they demonstrate a long-standing reciprocal relationship between Lithuania and the Jewish institution Lithuania most frequently presents beside itself in Holocaust-memory diplomacy.
Rabbi Andrew Baker, AJC Director of International Jewish Affairs and co-chair of the Good Will Foundation, has been honored by Lithuania repeatedly. Public biographies report that Baker received Lithuania’s Officer’s Cross of Merit in 2006 and the Lithuanian Diplomacy Star in 2012. In 2024, Lithuanian sources reported that he received the Cross of Commander of the Order for Merits to Lithuania. Former AJC CEO David Harris received the Cross of the Knight of the Order for Merits to Lithuania in 2021. Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda presented AJC CEO Ted Deutch with the Cross of the Knight of the Order “For Merits to Lithuania” in 2025.
The Deutch honor matters most for when it occurred. By 2025, Yad Vashem’s chairman had already named Noreika, Škirpa, and Krikštaponis from the Lithuanian parliamentary floor in September 2023. The Dawn of Nemunas had already entered Lithuania’s governing coalition over AJC’s own public objection in late 2024. Artur Fridman’s pre-trial investigation under Case No. 02-2-00512-24 had already been opened in 2024 and was running. Lithuania presented its highest-tier state award to AJC’s CEO inside that record, not before it. The honor was bestowed not in spite of the unresolved file, but alongside it.
I do not argue that a medal proves misconduct. It does not. I argue that medals prove relationship. They demonstrate that Lithuania views AJC leaders not as distant observers, but as valuable institutional partners. When that relationship is later used in public photographs, public statements, and Action Plan presentations, Litvak descendants are entitled to ask what accountability obligations accompany such proximity.
AJC may say it represents its own institutional position. That is fair. But if Lithuania uses AJC proximity to suggest Jewish communal validation of Lithuanian Holocaust-memory policy, then AJC must publicly define the limits of its mandate. It must say whom it does not represent. It does not represent me.
The 157-Measure Action Plan Is the Wrong Starting Point
On January 21, 2026, Lithuania announced a 157-measure Action Plan to combat antisemitism, xenophobia, hate speech, Holocaust denial, Holocaust trivialization, and historical distortion. Weeks later, Foreign Minister Kęstutis Budrys met AJC CEO Ted Deutch at the Munich Security Conference, where Lithuania presented the Plan and stated that manifestations of antisemitism and distortion of Holocaust memory are unacceptable.
On its face, the Plan is a marketing instrument more than a correction. It introduces little that is new and nothing that resolves the outstanding issues.
The Plan does not name LGGRTC. It does not name Noreika, Škirpa, Brazaitis, Krikštaponis, Borevičius, or the protected register of Lithuanian Holocaust collaborators. It does not address the Article 170² §1 asymmetry. It does not retract the 2015 LGGRTC vocabulary. It does not address the Fridman prosecution. A plan that cannot say what it is correcting is not a correction.
AJC legitimizing that plan in a photo opportunity for the Lithuanian government is a disservice to Jews. The photo opportunity was designed to present AJC as active on the file. Its result was to give Lithuania a propaganda opportunity, without any visible possibility of advancing the important issues.
Agents of the East, Jews, and Stupid People
The subhead of this article is not rhetorical decoration. It is one of the clearest examples of the state vocabulary Lithuania has never retracted. In November 2015, after nineteen Lithuanian intellectuals petitioned Vilnius authorities to remove honors for Jonas Noreika, the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania, LGGRTC, issued a public defense of Noreika. The petitioners were categorized as “Agents of the East (enemies of the State), Jews and other stupid people,” as I reproduced contemporaneously in VilNews.
The relevant fact is institutional. The statement came from Lithuania’s state historical institution while defending Jonas Noreika. It sorted critics of a state-honored Holocaust collaborator into categories useful to the state: foreign enemies, Jews, and fools.
That phrase has never been retracted.
This matters because state vocabulary, if unanswered, hardens into institutional memory. If a state historical institution can put Jews into a sentence of delegitimization while defending a Holocaust collaborator, and if no state body retracts it, the phrase becomes part of the operating record. It tells officials, courts, prosecutors, journalists, and foreign partners that Jewish protest may be treated as foreign pressure, reputational attack, disinformation, or stupidity rather than as evidence-based moral demand.
That is why I countered it. The counter-record began publicly. Within days of LGGRTC’s statement, I identified the language in VilNews and treated it as state-issued antisemitism. Lithuania did not retract. LGGRTC did not apologize. No state institution corrected the public meaning.
The counter-record then moved into formal channels. In 2017, I wrote to President Dalia Grybauskaitė concerning Holocaust denial at LGGRTC. The complaint was referred back to the institution whose conduct was at issue. In 2018, the Office of the Seimas Ombudsman issued findings identifying procedural violations in LGGRTC’s handling of complaints concerning Jonas Noreika. That same year, I filed a July 30, 2018 ethics complaint against LGGRTC Director Teresė Birutė Burauskaitė reproducing the 2015 statement in full.
I also requested that Lithuanian prosecutors apply Article 170² §1 to state Holocaust distortion. Lithuania refused. The record includes the August 17, 2018 prosecutor refusal, the September 26, 2018 application under Article 170² §1, and the November 12, 2018 second refusal.
The Lithuanian Parliament also participated in the circular-referral pattern. On March 30, 2022, the Parliament refused to consider the substance of my appeal, instructing me to go to court — the same courts that had already refused to consider the facts on procedural grounds. State institutions referred the file to one another in a closed loop. Procedure replaced correction.
This was not paperwork for its own sake. It was a counter-record. Lithuania had placed into the record a vocabulary of Jewish delegitimization. I placed into the record the objections, complaints, refusals, procedural detours, and institutional silences. That counter-record is why Lithuania cannot now claim that the problem was invisible.
AJC never once supported me in any of these efforts. My work ran parallel to AJC’s continuing role in legitimizing Lithuania before Jewish and Western audiences. While I was building a public record of Lithuania’s refusals, AJC’s relationship with Lithuania continued in public. My work documented the unresolved file. AJC’s proximity helped Lithuania project that the Jewish file was being responsibly handled. Those two tracks now have to be read together.
The inventory now documents forty-nine documented formal submissions to Lithuanian state bodies since 2015. In those forty-nine documented formal submissions, AJC’s name does not appear once. AJC has filed no complaint, joined no submission, signed no letter, supported no application. AJC’s institutional weight, repeatedly used to credit Lithuania abroad, has never been used to challenge Lithuania at home on this record.
AJC did speak once when public silence would have been conspicuous. In 2019, it criticized a Lithuanian legal effort to distort Holocaust history. That statement mattered, but it came after the issue had already been forced into public view through my litigation and after multiple other institutions had spoken. AJC reacted to the result of work it had not supported. It did not fund, join, sign, file, or materially assist the record that produced the moment.
AJC also has institutional capacity that I do not have. It has a large staff, professional infrastructure, donors, offices, and standing relationships with governments. I am one person, self-funded and limited by personal capacity. I paid my own expenses, lawyers, researchers, translators, lobbyists, and publication costs. AJC also has financial and institutional proximity to Lithuania through the restitution structures connected to Rabbi Baker, WJRO, and the Good Will Foundation. If AJC represents itself as working on this file, why is it absent on the most important issue in the file: factual memory?
We know how resistant Lithuania has been to correcting the record because forty-nine self-funded formal submissions did not move Lithuania to do so. Those actions received no support from AJC. Not one. Forty-nine separate efforts involving litigation, complaints, ethics proceedings, prosecutorial filings, ombudsman submissions, archival work, translation, and public documentation failed to produce institutional correction. If forty-nine formal submissions, years of documentary evidence, Dani Dayan’s address from the Lithuanian parliamentary floor, Efraim Zuroff’s sustained public work, international scrutiny, and AJC’s own years of engagement did not move Lithuania to confront the record, there was no realistic possibility that a photographed Action Plan meeting would do so. What the meeting could do was something else entirely: provide Lithuania with a propaganda opportunity. That is what occurred.
The Protected Register: Noreika, Škirpa, Brazaitis, Krikštaponis, Borevičius
The problem is not one phrase and one prosecution. The phrase sits inside a larger protected register of Lithuanian Holocaust-memory distortion.
LGGRTC declared Jonas Noreika innocent of Holocaust involvement, then issued a second Noreika memorandum on December 17, 2019 reframing him as a rescuer of Jews. Its author was not a historian. He was a state-employed geologist. The Lithuanian academic community publicly ridiculed the finding. LGGRTC has not retracted it. AJC has not addressed it.
Across decades of correspondence, Congressman Brad Sherman has repeatedly placed in writing that LGGRTC’s claim of a U.S. “complete exoneration” of Juozas Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis is fabricated: to Prime Minister Saulius Skvernelis on September 25, 2019; on Brazaitis again on November 10, 2020; to Lithuanian Ambassador Audra Plepytė on May 25, 2021; and to Lithuanian Ambassador Gediminas Varvuolis on March 20, 2026. The U.S. investigation Lithuania cites was closed after Brazaitis’s death without the finding Lithuania claims. Lithuania has not retracted the fraud. My April 16, 2026 reply to Sherman places the Litvak-side documentation alongside the Congressional record. AJC has not joined either.
Yad Vashem Chairman Dani Dayan then put the issue inside Lithuania’s own parliament. On September 21, 2023, he told the Seimas that names such as Noreika, Škirpa, and Krikštaponis do not add to Lithuania’s honor. Lithuania did not need my permission to know the file existed. Yad Vashem had said it from the parliamentary floor.
Borevičius belongs in the same protected register. The recent litigation file includes LGGRTC’s continued defense of Borevičius and the state’s refusal to correct the record. The point is not to multiply names for effect. The point is to show architecture: when confronted with evidence concerning protected Lithuanian figures, the state does not correct. It deflects, reframes, refuses, and waits.
Ramanauskas, AJC, and the Fridman Prosecution
AJC was not encountering the Ramanauskas issue for the first time when Artur Fridman was prosecuted. On May 8, 2019, Lithuania’s Foreign Ministry publicly reported that Foreign Minister Linas Linkevičius met AJC Director of International Jewish Affairs Rabbi Andrew Baker and U.S. Ambassador Anne Hall. According to Lithuania’s own account, Linkevičius discussed the unveiling of a monument to Adolfas Ramanauskas in Lemont, Illinois, and described criticism of Ramanauskas and of Lithuania’s partisan narrative as disinformation intended to undermine Lithuania’s anti-Soviet resistance.
That was not a meeting beside the doctrine. AJC sat inside it. Rabbi Baker, the AJC Director of International Jewish Affairs, was the institutional Jewish audience in front of whom Lithuania consolidated its theory that criticism of Ramanauskas is “disinformation.” That theory was not improvised. Five years later it became the prosecutorial frame against Artur Fridman, a Jewish citizen, under Case No. 02-2-00512-24. AJC was not a passive recipient of Lithuanian language. AJC was the Jewish institutional venue in front of which the Ramanauskas-disinformation doctrine was rehearsed before it became criminal exposure for a Jew.
And here the inversion has to be stated plainly. Lithuania has not punished any Lithuanian for the murder of Jews. It now prosecutes a Jewish citizen under Case No. 02-2-00512-24 for criticism of a state-honored figure. The state that left every perpetrator of Litvak murder unpunished now reaches for Article 170² §1 against a Jew.
AJC has been on the public record around Ramanauskas before. Not going on the public record now is therefore not neutral. It is abandonment. The perception is that AJC and Lithuania are so intertwined that it matters little what may be said behind closed doors. A public Lithuanian frame should receive a public AJC answer. Silence does not function as neutrality when the relationship itself is being used as evidence of legitimacy.
I make this demand publicly because private channels have not produced an answer. If AJC has objected privately, Lithuania has not publicly changed course. Lithuania still uses the relationship publicly. Under those circumstances, public silence becomes materially significant.
The asymmetry is statutory, not editorial — and now it is three-way, not binary. Lithuanian MP Valdas Rakutis published on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27, 2021, an article that blamed Jews. The full record is set out in The Rakutis Standard. He was not charged under Article 170² §1. In December 2025, a Lithuanian court convicted MP Remigijus Žemaitaitis under the same statutory family for incitement against Jews and Holocaust minimization. And in 2024, Lithuania opened the Fridman investigation against a Jewish citizen who criticized Ramanauskas. Article 170² §1 is therefore not a neutral rule. It is an instrument the Lithuanian state controls. It was unavailable against MP Rakutis on antisemitic conduct in 2021. It was unavailable against LGGRTC’s documented Holocaust distortion. It was applied against MP Žemaitaitis after coalition pressure broke. It was applied against a Jew who criticized a state-honored figure.
What insulates that selectivity from international consequence is Jewish institutional cover. Lithuania feels protected because AJC continues to appear beside it. The implied imprimatur — meetings, photographs, decorations, presentations of antisemitism plans alongside AJC’s senior figures — converts a selectivity problem into a tolerated one. Without that cover, the statutory pattern would be a diplomatic problem. With it, Lithuania can prosecute a Jew while the foremost American Jewish institution stands publicly alongside the state doing the prosecuting.
A state cannot prosecute a Jew for criticism of its honored figures and simultaneously claim to fight antisemitism. The structure is inverted. As I argued in The Eichmann Defense, Lithuania has placed itself in the position of prosecuting the witness.
Restitution Without Truth
Restitution requires its own discussion because it is one of the places where Lithuania’s need for international legitimacy and Jewish institutional participation converged.
Jewish property was stolen. Jewish communities were destroyed. Survivors and descendants deserved justice. Restitution was necessary. But restitution policy cannot substitute for historical accountability.
AJC, Rabbi Andrew Baker, and the World Jewish Restitution Organization helped facilitate Lithuania’s restitution process. AJC publicly welcomed a Lithuanian restitution law described as providing nearly $40 million; WJRO’s public materials refer to €37 million in proposed Lithuanian legislation and the longer restitution framework. Rabbi Baker became co-chair of the Good Will Foundation, the body administering Lithuanian Jewish restitution funds, alongside Faina Kukliansky on the Lithuanian Jewish Community side.
That governance structure carries its own transparency exposure. I asked the public questions in my Times of Israel article, Demanding Transparency, and the questions remain on the public record. They are not the central subject of this article, but they remain unresolved beside everything else that does.
Trading the truth of our slaughter for a pittance of our own stolen money is anathema. Money can be replaced. Truth cannot. Property can be compensated in part. Historical falsehood, once institutionalized and internationally legitimized, poisons memory across generations. These are blood-money funds in the moral sense: money connected to property left behind because Jewish owners were dispossessed, expelled, or murdered.
Lithuania needed restitution resolved for international legitimacy. Jewish institutions helped facilitate that resolution. But the underlying Holocaust-memory record remained unreformed. Lithuania received what it needed most: international legitimacy. A painful, unresolved Jewish claim became a resolved diplomatic item. Lithuania could point to restitution while preserving false memory. It could satisfy one Western requirement while leaving Noreika, Škirpa, Brazaitis, Krikštaponis, Borevičius, LGGRTC, the Article 170² §1 asymmetry, and the unretracted “Agents of the East” formulation unresolved.
In that transaction, Lithuania won. AJC and WJRO retained institutional centrality. Jews and history did not win. The murdered did not receive truth. Litvak descendants did not receive accountability. The public did not receive transparency. Money cannot replace the dignity of truth for the victims.
AJC’s own public filings show it is a major institution with substantial resources. ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer reports AJC’s 2024 total assets at approximately $335 million. That figure matters only because it underscores the moral imbalance: Jewish dignity in Lithuania should not be reduced to a transaction that Lithuania could afford, celebrate, and then use while truth remained unpaid.
A partial payment to Jewish communal structures does not compensate for the preservation of false memory. A restitution process without full transparency and without historical accountability risks becoming not justice, but closure for the state that needed the issue closed.
AJC, Silvia Foti, and the Difference Between Public Relations and Accountability
Because of AJC’s intensive relationship with the government of Lithuania, and because of my perception that this relationship has facilitated Lithuania’s Holocaust distortions, I tried to move AJC toward public accountability from another direction. I lobbied Rick Hirschhaut in AJC’s Los Angeles office to honor Silvia Foti for her bravery. Silvia is the granddaughter of Jonas Noreika and the author of the book that exposed her grandfather’s role. If AJC could publicly honor Lithuanian officials and sustain a deep relationship with Lithuania, it could also publicly honor the woman who told the truth Lithuania refused to tell.
Rick said the most he could do was write her a letter. AJC later published AJC Speaks with Silvia Foti, and the letter to Silvia exists in the public record. I appreciate that the letter was written. But the contrast matters. AJC can do unlimited public relations with the government of Lithuania. It can accept meetings, honors, diplomatic proximity, and public photographs. When it came to honoring Silvia Foti publicly for confronting Lithuania’s protected Noreika myth, a private or quiet letter was the maximum.
That is the difference between relationship management and accountability. Lithuania receives public institutional legitimacy. The people who expose Lithuania’s fraud receive private acknowledgment.
The Los Angeles Meeting and the Photograph
According to public accounts and attendee information available to me through Facebook posts and photographs, AJC hosted a Lithuanian state delegation in Los Angeles on May 1, 2026, where Lithuania’s antisemitism Action Plan was presented. The faces I am able to recognize include Ron Galperin, AJC Los Angeles Interim Regional Director; Zev Hurwitz, Director of Synagogue and Rabbinic Outreach at the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles, whose résumé crosses ADL, AJC, and Federation in sequence; and Odin Ozdil, Assistant Director at AJC. I do not recognize every person in the room, and I do not pretend to know each participant’s preparation.
That is part of the problem. What grounding did any of them have in Lithuania’s long record of Holocaust fraud, distortion, inversion, revision, and institutional evasion? What due diligence was provided before the meeting? What documents were reviewed? What questions were prepared? What was the goal of the meeting, and what did Jewish participants achieve from it?
The only apparent public result was a photograph Lithuania could use to promote its legitimacy. If there was another result, the Jewish public deserves to know what it was.
Before that meeting, Eugene J. Levin had published Lithuania at AJC: A Warning. I had published Lithuania Closes the Loop. The Fridman prosecution was public. The Article 170² §1 asymmetry was public. The LGGRTC record was public. The 2015 statement was public. Dani Dayan’s Seimas address was public. My litigation inventory was public. No secret information was required. Only diligence.
The relevant question is whether the people in the room were prepared. Did they know the Noreika record? Did they know the LGGRTC record? Did they know the Article 170² §1 refusals? Did they know the Fridman file? Did they know that Lithuania had already framed Ramanauskas criticism to AJC as disinformation? Did they know that Yad Vashem’s chairman had named Noreika, Škirpa, and Krikštaponis in the Lithuanian Seimas? Did they know that the phrase placing Jews beside foreign influence and stupidity had never been retracted?
What standing did any of them have to represent Litvak interests on Lithuanian Holocaust accountability? Who authorized them to speak, appear, listen, or lend communal presence on behalf of murdered Lithuanian Jewry, Litvak descendants, or those of us who have spent decades building the record Lithuania refuses to answer?
AJC, ADL, Federation, and the Public Pressure Track AJC Did Not Join
AJC is central to this article because of its unusually long and visible relationship with Lithuania. But ADL and the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles are not exempt from scrutiny. Lithuania’s Foreign Ministry publicly reported that on September 26, 2019, Foreign Minister Linkevičius met in New York with leaders and representatives of major U.S.-based Jewish organizations, including AJC, the World Jewish Congress, B’nai B’rith International, YIVO, ADL, and others. The meeting focused on historical memory, Holocaust education, antisemitism, restitution, and cultural projects.
These institutions are entitled to engage Lithuania. But Litvak descendants are equally entitled to ask what conditions, if any, were imposed before Jewish institutional legitimacy was extended. Were questions publicly asked about the Fridman prosecution? Was Lithuania publicly asked whether the 2015 LGGRTC statement was antisemitic? Was Lithuania publicly asked why Article 170² §1 could be unavailable for state Holocaust distortion but available against a Jewish citizen? Was Lithuania publicly asked why the statement remains unretracted?
If those questions were asked privately, the public deserves to know the answers. If they were not asked at all, that fact is also significant.
Lithuania has received concrete public pressure on Holocaust memory from U.S. and allied officials across multiple administrations. Special Envoy Cherrie Daniels engaged Vilnius on Holocaust memorialization issues in September 2019. Ambassador Robert Gilchrist made a public intervention on January 27, 2021. The U.S., German, and Israeli ambassadors held a joint meeting in Vilnius on March 24, 2021. Commissioner Paul Packer wrote directly to MP Valdas Rakutis on January 29, 2021 over Rakutis’s International Holocaust Remembrance Day article. ICAN sent a public letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Special Envoy Daniels, and Ambassador Gilchrist on April 22, 2021. The U.S.-Germany Holocaust Dialogue convened in 2021, 2023, and 2025. AJC was not a public co-signatory to that record.
AJC Can Speak Publicly When It Chooses
AJC has shown that it can publicly criticize Lithuania when it chooses. In November 2024, AJC urged Lithuanian Social Democrats not to form a coalition with the Dawn of Nemunas party, led by Remigijus Žemaitaitis, because of antisemitism concerns. AJC warned that inclusion of that party would strengthen those with antisemitic views and damage Lithuania’s democratic reputation.
The coalition formed anyway. In December 2025, a Lithuanian court found Žemaitaitis guilty in a first-instance ruling involving incitement against Jews and Holocaust minimization, as reported by LRT and Reuters.
That timeline is itself the indictment. The Žemaitaitis coalition formed in late 2024 over AJC’s own public objection. Through 2024 and 2025 the coalition remained in place. During the same period, the Fridman pre-trial investigation was running under Case No. 02-2-00512-24, and Lithuania was drafting the 157-measure Action Plan. AJC has positioned itself as the foremost Jewish institutional voice on the Lithuania file. By that self-positioning, AJC carries a corresponding due-diligence obligation. Yet while two live antisemitism events were unfolding inside Lithuania at the same time — an antisemite seated in the governing coalition and a Jewish citizen under prosecution for criticism of a state-honored figure — AJC continued the public relationship without surfacing either fact in the meetings, presentations, and photographs that legitimized Lithuania’s antisemitism narrative abroad. An institution that claims foremost status on a file and then stands beside the responsible state without raising the file’s two contemporaneous antisemitism events is not engaged on the file. It is performing engagement.
That history matters because it demonstrates that AJC already understood Lithuania’s antisemitism problem, and that AJC can speak publicly when it decides to. The contrast is therefore sharper. AJC will warn Lithuania publicly about Žemaitaitis. It has not, on the public record I have found, spoken with comparable public directness about Fridman, LGGRTC, the Article 170² §1 asymmetry, or the unretracted 2015 phrase.
That is not an absence of capacity. It is a difference in choice.
The Questions Lithuania Did Not Answer
The same pattern appeared again in 2026 after the Fridman prosecution became public. Dillon Hosier, CEO of the Israeli-American Civic Action Network, sent Lithuania a formal ICAN letter asking direct questions about Holocaust memory, protected historical discourse, Jonas Noreika, Juozas Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis, and the Fridman prosecution. Lithuania sent a reply.
Mr. Hosier asked whether Lithuania regards criticism of Jonas Noreika as protected historical discourse. Lithuania did not answer.
He asked whether Lithuania distinguishes Holocaust denial from criticism of Holocaust collaborators it honors. Lithuania did not answer.
He asked whether Lithuania disputes the historical record. Lithuania did not answer.
He asked Lithuania’s current position on honors for Noreika and Juozas Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis. Lithuania did not answer.
These are precisely the questions AJC should publicly ask as well. Has AJC ever asked these questions? If not, why not? If so, what answers did it receive? If AJC has received answers behind closed doors, the Jewish public deserves to know them. A public Lithuanian record requires a public Jewish institutional answer.
Minimum Conditions for Credibility
No Jewish institution should publicly validate Lithuania’s antisemitism policy without first requiring Lithuania to answer the unresolved record. At minimum:
Lithuania should retract the November 2015 LGGRTC statement and all other antisemitic statements I have vigorously pointed out.
Lithuania should identify who issued or approved the “Agents of the East (enemies of the State), Jews and other stupid people” formulation and whether any institutional correction was ever made.
Lithuania should address state distortions concerning Noreika, Škirpa, Brazaitis, Krikštaponis, Borevičius, and related Holocaust-memory issues.
Lithuania should retract the Stančikas/Noreika rescuer inversion and the fabricated U.S. exoneration claim concerning Brazaitis.
Lithuania should explain the Article 170² §1 asymmetry: why the statute was unavailable when Jews asked the state to examine Holocaust distortion by a state institution, but available when Lithuania chose to prosecute Artur Fridman.
Lithuania should withdraw the Fridman prosecution.
Lithuania should stop using Jewish institutional meetings as substitutes for documentary accountability.
These are not radical demands. They are the minimum threshold for credibility.
Conclusion: The Photograph Is Not the Record
Artur Fridman is not incidental to Lithuania’s antisemitism Action Plan. He is the test of it.
A state prosecuting a Jewish citizen for speech concerning historical memory while simultaneously presenting itself internationally as a guardian against antisemitism has not resolved its contradiction. It has exposed it.
Lithuania tolerated institutional vocabulary placing Jewish critics beside enemies and fools. Lithuania never retracted it. Lithuania refused repeated opportunities to confront its own record. Lithuania now prosecutes a Jewish citizen under historical-speech laws while asking Jewish institutions to help project moral credibility abroad.
AJC has not functioned as the accountability partner Litvak memory needed. It has instead become Lithuania’s preferred Jewish institutional interlocutor — and Lithuania uses that relationship to project credibility before the underlying record has been answered.
I do not consent to AJC speaking in my name on Lithuanian Holocaust accountability. I do not consent to Lithuania using Jewish institutional proximity as evidence that Litvak memory has been consulted, represented, or satisfied.
Lithuania prosecutes a Jew under historical-speech law. Lithuania defends an institution that placed Jews beside enemies and fools. Lithuania asks Jewish organizations to validate the plan that does not name what it claims to fix. AJC stands beside Lithuania while that record stands. The murdered do not need another photograph. They need truth.