In April 2019, the chairs and recent chairs of the expert working groups and committees of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance issued a statement of grave concern about a single Member Country. They named the institution. They named the historical figure. They named the documentary record the institution was contradicting. They named the distortion standard.
The statement is still on IHRA’s website. Seven years later, the record it identified has not been cured. What has changed is worse: Lithuania has moved from refusing to cure the state-memory problem IHRA identified in 2019 to prosecuting a Jewish citizen for challenging the same machinery of criminalized memory.
The violation is no longer the 2019 distortion. It is the refusal to cure after IHRA notice.
Why now? Because Lithuania has again been given direct notice. A pre-submission notice has been transmitted to Lithuanian diplomatic, governmental, historical, and communal recipients. Lithuania has been asked to answer before a protective filing proceeds. The questions are not theatrical. They are the questions any IHRA Member Country committed to Holocaust truth should be able to answer. Did Lithuania ever formally answer IHRA’s 2019 statement? Does it dispute the Noreika orders? Does LGGRTC still rely on its rescuer theory? Has LGGRTC supplied or shaped evidence in the Fridman prosecution? Does Lithuania distinguish Holocaust denial from criticism of collaborators it chooses to honor?
- What IHRA Said in 2019
The signatories were not outside critics. They were the chairs and recent chairs of IHRA’s own expert working groups and committees, the people the Alliance itself appoints to help define what Holocaust distortion is and is not.
They addressed the Lithuanian Genocide and Resistance Research Centre, the LGGRTC, by name. They addressed Jonas Noreika by name. They wrote that documentary sources indicated Noreika had a key role in the ghettoization and expropriation of Jews in the Šiauliai district in 1941. They criticized LGGRTC’s continued public framing of Noreika as a rescuer without evidence of his direct role in rescue activity. They stated that Noreika’s later anti-Soviet resistance did not prove innocence during the Holocaust years.
Then they tied the matter directly to IHRA’s Working Definition of Holocaust Denial and Distortion. That definition identifies intentional efforts to excuse or minimize the Holocaust or its principal elements, including collaborators and allies of Nazi Germany, as Holocaust distortion.
This was not a casual disagreement with a Lithuanian historical interpretation. It was an application of IHRA’s own anti-distortion standard to the conduct of a Member Country’s state historical institution. In the diplomatic language of a consensus organization, the 2019 statement was severe.
That was the warning. The evidentiary sequence is a matter of public record:
Claim: LGGRTC maintains a public narrative framing Jonas Noreika as a rescuer.
Record: Jonas Noreika signed archival orders regarding the ghettoization and expropriation of Jews in the Šiauliai district.
Contradiction: IHRA’s 2019 statement explicitly applied its anti-distortion standard to LGGRTC’s conduct.
Persistence: The Republic of Lithuania has maintained this state-memory architecture for seven years without correction.
- What Cure Would Have Looked Like
Cure would not have been complicated. Lithuania could have published a formal government response to IHRA. LGGRTC could have withdrawn or corrected its Noreika rescuer materials. The state could have produced the due-diligence file behind the Noreika rehabilitation. It could have separated later anti-Soviet biography from Holocaust-era administrative conduct. It could have acknowledged that ghettoization and expropriation were not peripheral administrative details but part of the machinery of genocide. It could have accepted IHRA’s invitation to open dialogue and joint research with international experts.
Lithuania did not do that.
The Lithuanian Presidential Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes responded on April 11, 2019. That response addressed the form of the IHRA criticism. It did not cure the documentary substance. The signed orders in the Lithuanian Central State Archive were not made to disappear. The rescuer theory was not withdrawn. The public memory architecture remained.
The Lithuanian Parliamentary Ombudsman, in file Reference 4D-2017/1-1558/3D-317, treated the matter as a problem of administrative procedure rather than historical integrity. That may have been useful to bureaucracy. It did not answer IHRA.
On December 22, 2020, in response to a congressional inquiry from United States Representative Brad Sherman, LGGRTC dismissed the questions as “the opinion of a politician, not a new historical source.” That sentence is revealing. The problem was never Representative Sherman’s opinion. The problem was the historical record. The signed archival orders existed before the congressman wrote. IHRA’s warning existed before LGGRTC dismissed him. The documentary question remained the documentary question.
The Lithuanian Institute of History, Lithuania’s own academic body for the period, has declined to collaborate with LGGRTC on the Noreika materials. The Streikus expert council, formally established to review LGGRTC’s work, notified the Speaker of the Seimas and three parliamentary committees on March 22, 2026, that it could not work with LGGRTC under its current leadership.
Lithuania’s own institutional ecosystem has now confirmed the problem IHRA experts identified in 2019. The cure has not happened. It has been refused.
III. What Came Next: Criminal Enforcement
Artur Fridman is not the Noreika case. That is precisely why the prosecution matters. It shows that the Noreika method was not isolated. The same state-memory apparatus that neutralized Noreika has become a broader system for protecting honored nationalist figures while criminalizing Jewish challenge.
On May 9, 2024, Fridman, a Lithuanian Jewish citizen, published a Facebook post at his grandfather’s grave. His grandfather had been a Red Army volunteer who fought Nazi Germany. The post discussed the state rehabilitation of Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas, a postwar partisan whose record includes documented Soviet security-service contact under the registered codename Džūkija, archival reference LYA f. K-41, ap. 1, b. 205, l. 19, confirmed by LGGRTC’s own letter Reference 13R-645 dated September 2, 2025.
On October 30, 2025, the Vilnius District Prosecutor filed a 220-page indictment against Fridman under Article 170² § 1 of the Lithuanian Criminal Code, the statute against approving, denying, or grossly trivializing crimes recognized by Lithuania. The case number is 02-2-00512-24. I addressed the warning function of that prosecution in Before Lithuania Prosecuted Fridman, It Warned Me.
The same legal system also knows how to prosecute anti-Jewish Holocaust distortion when it chooses. On December 4, 2025, the Vilnius Regional Court convicted Remigijus Žemaitaitis, leader of the Nemunas Dawn party, of inciting hatred against Jews and grossly minimizing the Holocaust, a conviction reported by AP and Reuters.
That conviction matters here because it removes one excuse. Lithuania cannot say it lacks legal tools. It has them. It uses them. The violation is not simple non-enforcement. The violation is selectivity. A state-aligned historical institution distorts the role of honored nationalist figures and remains protected. A Jewish citizen challenges state rehabilitation at his grandfather’s grave and faces a 220-page indictment.
This is the same legal system, the same historical-memory statute, and the same state applying criminal memory law in opposite directions within the same period.
- The Cure-Default Frame
There is a category mistake in how the Lithuanian state treats the 2019 IHRA statement. The state treats it as a contested opinion. It is not. It is a finding by the body that defines the standard.
When IHRA’s experts identified LGGRTC’s Noreika materials as a distortion concern in 2019, they were not raising a new question. They were applying IHRA’s own working definition to a documented record. The signed orders in the Lithuanian Central State Archive were not in dispute. LGGRTC’s rescuer framing was not in dispute. The application of one to the other was the analytic act, and IHRA’s experts performed it on the public record.
Seven years of non-compliance after that finding is not silence. It is institutional refusal. It creates a specific procedural posture: this is a cure-default case.
The Stockholm Declaration commits Member Countries to uphold the terrible truth of the Holocaust, promote education, remembrance, and research, encourage the study of the Holocaust in all its dimensions, and open archives. The 2020 IHRA Ministerial Declaration commits Member Countries to counter Holocaust denial and distortion, safeguard the historical record, and address their respective pasts openly and accurately. Lithuania accepted those standards. The Noreika file is the file IHRA flagged. It remains uncured.
Lithuania systematically elevates the 0.04% of its population recognized as Righteous Among Nations to stand for the wartime record of the whole. This demographic substitution is itself a mechanism of distortion under IHRA standards. The state uses the 0.04% to displace the documented conduct of the remaining 99.96%, the local participation and institutional complicity in the dispossession and murder of Lithuania’s Jews. An administrative framework has grown up around the substitution to insulate that record from accountability.
I measured Lithuanian state conduct against IHRA’s distortion framework in Membership by Violation. I documented LGGRTC’s methodological discrediting of the Holocaust eyewitness Aleksandras Pakalniškis in How Lithuania Discredited Its Witness. The Lithuania litigation inventory records years of formal submissions, complaints, refusals, and litigation. The record is no longer waiting to be discovered. It is waiting to be enforced.
- What IHRA Must Now Decide
A pre-submission notice has now been transmitted to Lithuania, and IHRA’s Permanent Office and related leadership channels have been notified that a protective filing is forthcoming. The requested action is institutional, not judicial: referral to expert bodies; a required written response from Lithuania; publication of that response; a corrective-action process with defined deadlines, public reporting, and independent expert review; and suspension, downgrade, or revocation of Lithuania’s IHRA Member-Country status if uncured.
That is not an extraordinary request. It is the application of IHRA’s own findings to the Member Country those findings concerned.
The question is no longer whether Lithuania can recite IHRA’s vocabulary. It can. The question is whether IHRA membership means anything after IHRA’s own experts identify distortion and the Member Country refuses cure.
The 2019 statement either meant something, or it did not. The signed orders in the Lithuanian Central State Archive are what they are. LGGRTC’s rescuer materials are what they are. The Fridman indictment is what it is. The Žemaitaitis conviction is what it is. The Streikus expert council notification is what it is.
If the 2019 statement meant something, Lithuania must answer. If it meant nothing, then IHRA has allowed its own standard to become a credential for the state practice it was created to confront.
The petition asks IHRA to choose: compliance, or immunity.
Questions Lithuania Must Answer
Grant Arthur Gochin is a diplomat, journalist, and wealth advisor focused on historical accountability, Jewish continuity, and recognition doctrine. He serves as Honorary Consul for the Republic of Togo and is the Emeritus Special Envoy for Diaspora Affairs of the African Union, representing all fifty-five AU member states. He is also Emeritus Dean of the Los Angeles Consular Corps.
Gochin is Advisor on Recognition Doctrine and Sovereignty to the Mthwakazi Republic Party, Office of the President, providing advisory guidance on international recognition, sovereignty theory, and comparative precedent relating to remedial self-determination.
His philanthropic work in Togo led to his investiture as Chief of the Village of Babade. Over several decades, Gochin has documented and restored Jewish heritage in Lithuania, including leading the Maceva Project, which mapped and preserved dozens of abandoned and desecrated Jewish cemeteries. His work exposed state-sponsored Holocaust revisionism and contributed to international recognition of systematic manipulation of historical memory.
Gochin is the author of *Malice, Murder and Manipulation* (2013), which traces the destruction of his family in Lithuania and examines postwar historical distortion. A consistent advocate against antisemitism, antizionism, and other forms of bigotry, he writes and speaks internationally on the political uses of history and the necessity of historical integrity for Jewish survival. His journalism confronts governmental misinformation and disinformation campaigns and maintains a firm position on Israel’s legitimacy and security grounded in historical evidence and collective survival.
Professionally, Gochin is a Certified Financial Planner™ and wealth advisor based in California. He holds an MBA earned with academic distinction and leads Grant Arthur & Associates Wealth Services. He lives in Los Angeles with his husband, son, and dog, Kelev.
https://www.grantgochin.com