Dovid Katz
Image by richard schofield
Image by richard schofield
Occasionally prone to hyperbole, Katz, who divides his time between Lithuania and the United Kingdom, has spent years fighting what he perceives to be Lithuanian doublespeak. On the one hand, the Baltic nation has launched pro-Jewish initiatives, such as making 2011 the “Year of Remembrance for Holocaust
Victims.” On the other hand, Katz argues, it has whitewashed Lithuanian complicity in the Holocaust while agitating to equate crimes committed by Soviets in the Baltics with Nazi atrocities.
YIVO, which was founded in 1925 in Vilna, is intimately tied up with this history. A portion of its treasured archive was hidden from the Nazis and then from the Soviets until just before the fall of the Soviet Union. Today, the Lithuanian government claims ownership of that collection. For YIVO’s executive director, Jonathan Brent, establishing a room at the Lithuanian National Library is a pragmatic solution to a decades-long quandary. For Katz, who has led a months-long campaign against the move, leaving the archive in Vilna is nothing short of capitulation.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
