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Lithuanian Jews who survived the Nazi Holocaust and Soviet terror during World War II will receive symbolic compensation from the Baltic state next year, a Jewish group leader said Wednesday.<\/p>\n
Andrew Baker of the American Jewish Committee told journalists in Vilnius that three million litas (870,000 euros, $1.4 million) “will be used as a symbolic payment to individual Lithuanian Jewish survivors of totalitarian regimes.”<\/p>\n
Faina Kukliansky, a leader in Lithuania’s small Jewish community of around 5,000, said she expected more than a thousand people to share the funds next year.<\/p>\n
“It is a symbol which proves that Lithuanian Jews are full members of a tolerant and open Lithuanian society,” she told journalists.<\/p>\n
The money is part of a 128-million-lita compensation fund for Jewish properties lost during the Nazi or Soviet eras that Lithuania is to disburse between 2013-2023 under a law passed last year.<\/p>\n
Baker said this amount “should be sufficient to guarantee the long-term viability of Jewish life in Lithuania”, although it does not represent the full value of Jewish communal property.<\/p>\n
“Some measure of justice has now been achieved”, he insisted.<\/p>\n
Lithuania was occupied by the Soviets in 1940 under a pact with the Nazi regime in Berlin, and tens of thousands of Lithuanians were killed or deported to Siberia and Central Asia before the Nazis themselves launched a surprise invasion in 1941.<\/p>\n
That occupation saw the near-total destruction of Lithuania’s 200,000-strong Jewish community.<\/p>\n
The Soviets returned in 1944, and cracked down again. Lithuania estimates that it lost 780,000 people under Soviet occupation between 1940-1941 and 1944-1952, as people fled to the West, were deported to Siberia, or killed battling Soviet forces.<\/p>\n
Lithuania, a nation of three million, was the first republic to secede from the Soviet Union in 1990. It joined the European Union and NATO in 2004.<\/p>\n
Last week Jewish groups urged other ex-communist European states to return, or provide compensation for, assets seized from Holocaust victims estimated to be worth billions of dollars.<\/p>\n
Latvia, Poland and Romania were singled out in particular.<\/p>\n
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