Lithuania scraps years of planning by Jewish groups to convert sports complex into Jewish heritage site
The announcement of the new plans for the Soviet-era sports complex has drawn criticism from Jewish advocates
The Vilnius Palace of Concerts and Sports. Photo by Flickr Commons
(JTA) — A Jewish group is outraged by Lithuania’s plans to convert a sports complex into a convention center at the site of a historic Jewish cemetery, reversing decades of advocacy to commemorate the memorial site.
The Snipiskes Jewish Cemetery, currently buried beneath the Soviet-era Vilnius Sports Palace, has long been a source of contention between the government and Jewish groups that sought to preserve the memory of the Jews buried there.
In recent years, a working group that included Rabbi Andrew Baker, the American Jewish Committee’s director of international Jewish affairs, came to an agreement with the former Lithuanian government to have the complex converted into a Jewish heritage site.
But Lithuanian Prime Minister Gintautas Paluckas’s announcement last week of a convention center, despite his pledge to “preserve attention to both the significance of this place for Lithuanian history and the memory of the events that marked it,” appears to have undermined those efforts.
“This reverses an internationally endorsed decision of the previous government which rightly committed to transforming the site into a place of Jewish remembrance and education,” wrote the AJC in a post on X Friday.
AJC added that the decision “raises serious questions and casts a shadow over Lithuania’s stated commitment to Holocaust memory and Jewish heritage.”
The cemetery contains the remains of countless Jewish luminaries who lived in what before the Holocaust was known as the “Jerusalem of Vilna” for its scholarship and piety. It included the burial site of the 18th-century sage known as the Vilna Gaon, whose remains were exhumed in 1949 before the Soviets destroyed the graveyard.
“I think people who’ve been involved in this are angered, are upset and feel betrayed,” Baker told JTA. “This was a long process to come up with a consensus on what should be done with the structure after for many years it was contested.”
Baker said that Lithuania’s previous government, which was led by Prime Minister Ingrida Šimonytė, had agreed to the proposal to renovate the Soviet sports complex into a Jewish heritage site, but the new government’s approach felt “cavalier” and “offensive.”
According to the Made in Vilnius news site, Paluckas’s announcement stipulated that the previous proposal recommended by the Lithuanian Jewish community and the European Committee for the Preservation of Jewish Cemeteries would be honored. But Baker said it would merely add “some description of the fact that this was a Jewish cemetery.”
“This would just somehow be to say ‘we’re going to turn it into a conference center, but somewhere we’ll let people know this was a Jewish cemetery,’ which is surely totally unacceptable,” said Baker. “It’s not any solution.”
Baker said that he had been in touch with the American ambassador to Lithuania about the new plans for the sports complex, and hoped that the prime minister would reverse his decision.
“Turning it into a convention or conference center, with the sort of activities that would take place in such a spot, would be considered a desecration and an outrage and would not bode well,” said Baker.
