A passport can be an escape route. It can also be an heirloom.

Jews understand passports differently from people who have never had to imagine an exit route. Long before October 7, sociologist Yossi Harpaz documented that close to 60,000 Israelis had sought citizenship in Central and Eastern European countries from which their families had come. He found that a second citizenship could function as an “insurance policy” and as an intergenerational gift. I understand both ideas intimately.

I was born in South Africa. I am a citizen of South Africa, the United States, and Lithuania. I do not regard multiple citizenships as trophies or as declarations of divided loyalty. I regard them as protection against the arrogance of assuming that political conditions will always remain benign.

That instinct came to me through family history. My grandfather Samuel Gochin gave me my Litvak heritage, its stories and its obligations. He would have expected me to do everything within my power to protect Jewish lives. I could not protect the Jews Lithuania murdered before I was born. I could, however, fight to make sure that some of their descendants would have another country in which the law says they belong.

The citizenship I did not need

My effort to recover Lithuanian citizenship did not begin because I needed another place to live. It began as an act of attachment to my grandfather and to the family history he had given me.

Lithuania turned that act of memory into litigation.

The documentary record is extensive. After a 2007 Migration Department denial, I pursued five court proceedings between 2008 and 2011. A 2008 administrative court sustained the denial. A 2010 court again held that I had not adequately proved my kinship to Samuel Gochin. On July 21, 2011, the Lithuanian Supreme Administrative Court overturned that result and required the Migration Department to reconsider the evidence as a whole. The fight did not end there. Administrative correspondence continued. My final citizenship decree came in 2014.

I had already told much of that story in my 2013 book Malice, Murder and Manipulation. The litigation was not a symbolic quarrel from abroad. It involved Lithuanian lawyers, translations, archives, repeated applications and years of work. For me, it was a fight against antisemitism by the state I continue to blame for the slaughter of my own family. It was also a statement: they had not managed to murder every single one of us, and we were not going away.

The issue was larger than my own file. By the middle of the next decade, Litvak applicants were being required to prove that they or their ancestors had left interwar Lithuania because of persecution or an imminent threat. For families whose records had been destroyed by war, flight and genocide, the demand could be impossible. I had made my own case public in 2010 and challenged the wider obstruction in 2015. By 2016 the refusals had become an international story.

When the law changed

In June 2016 the Lithuanian parliament adopted an amendment intended to remove that obstacle. The South African Jewish Board of Deputies publicly welcomed the amendment and said it had worked with the Lithuanian government on the issue. The Lithuanian Jewish Community also supported the correction. I do not claim that I changed Lithuanian citizenship law alone. Other Litvaks applied. Lawyers litigated. Jewish organizations intervened. Parliamentarians acted.

But I had spent years litigating the system, documenting it, attacking it publicly and internationalizing what Lithuania was doing to Litvak applicants. I claim, without hesitation, my share of the result.

The effect was immediate. Migration Department figures reported by BNS showed that 223 applicants of Jewish ethnicity had their citizenship restored through the third quarter of 2016: 209 Israeli citizens and 14 South Africans, with no refusals. Another 36 previously rejected applicants were also granted citizenship.

In the first half of 2017 Lithuania restored 1,131 citizenships. The Migration Department director said most went to Litvaks from Israel and South Africa.

The correction did not end the struggle. After a 2020 court interpretation, applicants again faced a restrictive evidentiary rule concerning whether an ancestor had retained Lithuanian citizenship until June 15, 1940. There were 352 refusals in 2021. The Seimas amended the law again in January 2022; the following year the deputy interior minister said refusals had fallen to 81 in 2022.

The scale nevertheless became substantial. By mid-November 2023, Lithuania reported about 2,200 restorations that year; Israelis were the largest group of applicants (485), followed by Brazilians and South Africans (401). By October 2024 the South African Jewish Report said more than 4,000 South Africans had recovered Lithuanian citizenship. My estimate, and it is only an estimate, is that more than 10,000 Litvak descendants have now had Lithuanian citizenship restored.

Lithuania once publicly counted some restorations by Jewish ethnicity, but it no longer publishes a consistent Jewish total in the official statistics available to me. I therefore do not pretend to know the exact number of Litvak descendants who have recovered citizenship. What is clear is that the number is in the many thousands. Lithuanian law recognizes an indefinite right of eligible pre-1940 citizens and their descendants to reinstate citizenship.

What the fight became

The pathway I spent years fighting to clear eventually became an industry. Lawyers charge legal fees. Researchers locate records. Genealogists, translators and other specialists provide services to descendants seeking restoration of citizenship. A legal and documentary marketplace has grown around a pathway that, for me, was always a matter of principle.

I do not begrudge anyone earning a living from legitimate work. But that was never why I did it. I did it for love of my people and for historical justice. Everything I do concerning Lithuania comes from the same place: I want Jews whose families were driven from that country or murdered there to remain part of its historical record. I want their descendants to retain the citizenship connection and historical belonging that can still be preserved. And I want the truth about what happened to them to be told without euphemism, erasure or rehabilitation of those responsible.

My separation from money is deliberate. I do not involve myself in property restitution, inherited-property claims, compensation claims or other financial recovery from Lithuania, and I take no position on them. Those are matters for others. My work is about citizenship, historical truth, Jewish continuity, recognition and memory. I will not hand antisemites an easy distortion that a Jew demanding historical justice must secretly be doing it for money.

That distinction has mattered even in court. In one litigation, the court treated monetary damages as the remedy available to me, while I was refusing to turn the dispute into a claim for money; that became part of the procedural problem. In my fifth citizenship lawsuit, I did demand a refund as a matter of principle, but my legal fees exceeded the amount I sought. There was no profit in any of it. The point was the principle.

Citizenship was one expression of that obligation. The historical work is another. The motive is the same: love for my people, and a determination that the truth about them not be lost.

When Lithuania discovered the benefit

Lithuania repeatedly treated restoration for Litvak descendants as something to restrict, including after the first legislative correction. Over time, however, the institutional calculation changed. Restored citizenship can serve Lithuania too.

Citizenship restoration does not itself mean residence. Most restored Litvak descendants already have established lives elsewhere, and receiving Lithuanian citizenship does not by itself create immediate use of Lithuania’s medical or social systems. Lithuania can therefore rebuild a legal relationship with a large diaspora with comparatively little immediate fiscal exposure simply from conferring citizenship.

Lithuanian Jewish Community chair Faina Kukliansky saw that benefit as early as 2016. She said Lithuania had “lost nothing at all” and gained “a good name and living potential.” The larger gain is relational: restored citizenship reconnects Lithuania with a worldwide Litvak diaspora and creates space for family and historical reconnection, cultural engagement, academic exchange, dialogue and reconciliation.

The inversion is striking. Lithuania once expended institutional energy fighting descendants who were asking to return, legally, to the citizenship of their families. Today restored Litvak citizens can become a bridge between Lithuania and a Jewish world from which it was catastrophically severed.

That is not charity to Jews, and it is not a concession for which we should be grateful. Restoration recognizes a legal and historical relationship that should never have required years of litigation to establish. But Lithuania can benefit from doing what is right. Justice and national interest do not always have to be adversaries.

One of the greatest legacies of my life

I regard those restored citizenships as one of the greatest legacies of my life.

That statement is intentionally personal. I do not mean that every successful applicant owes a passport to me. I mean that I fought a system that obstructed descendants like me; I helped force that obstruction into public view; the system changed; and thousands of families subsequently obtained the legal status for which I had fought.

Most of those people will never know my name. That does not matter. If a South African Jewish family now has an additional country in which its children have a legal right to belong, I am proud of having helped create that possibility. Political insurance is most valuable before anyone knows it will be needed.

The passport may never serve as an escape route. I hope it never does.

Its second function is just as important.

A passport as an heirloom

Citizenship can preserve memory in a way a family tree cannot. A child’s passport contains the child’s name, photograph and nationality in an official legal document. Eventually that child asks: Why am I Lithuanian?

Then the learning begins.

Who were our grandparents and great-grandparents? Where did they live? Why did they leave? What happened to the Jewish towns, schools, synagogues, families and institutions that once existed there? Why did someone in the family have to fight to recover this citizenship? Why did it matter enough to pass forward?

A genealogy tells a child that an ancestor came from Lithuania. Citizenship tells the child that the legal relationship did not entirely disappear with the ancestor. The passport points backward toward history and forward toward possibility.

That is why I regard citizenship as both refuge and inheritance.

The country I did not choose

There is a private regret behind this, too. Israel might easily have been the country in which I built my life. I have ADHD and have long suspected that I may also be on the autism spectrum. Language learning and retention have always been unusually difficult for me. I could not master Hebrew well enough to imagine functioning there professionally and socially, so I came to the United States instead.

I still cannot read or speak Hebrew. It is one of the greatest regrets of my life. I sometimes wonder whether, with the educational support available to children today, my life might have taken a different path and I might have become Israeli.

That regret did not diminish my attachment to Israel. It sharpened something else: the conviction that legitimate citizenship options should be preserved before a family discovers that it needs them.

Why citizenship led me to historical truth

My citizenship work also explains why I remain so focused on historical truth in Lithuania.

The two projects are not separate. I fought for Lithuania to recognize that descendants still belong. I now fight for Lithuania to tell the truth about the ancestors from whom that belonging came.

There is no point handing a child Lithuanian citizenship while allowing the history explaining why that child’s family lives in Johannesburg, Tel Aviv, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Montevideo or Buenos Aires instead of the Lithuanian town their ancestors inhabited for generations to be erased or falsified.

Lithuanian Jewish civilization was not merely reduced in population. It was almost annihilated as a functioning world. Families disappeared. Communities disappeared. Institutions disappeared. The ability of one generation to transmit its life naturally to the next was violently severed. Citizenship cannot restore that civilization. But it can preserve one strand of legal continuity through the rupture.

That is why truth matters to me with the same intensity as citizenship. A restored passport without restored historical truth would be an incomplete inheritance.

What I want left behind

Someday my own work will end. The passports will remain in drawers and safes belonging to families I will never meet. Children not yet born may inherit them.

I hope none of those children ever needs Lithuanian citizenship as refuge. I hope they use it for study, travel, work, curiosity, family research or nothing at all. But if political circumstances ever make another legal home important, I want the option to exist.

And when one of those children looks at the passport and asks why it exists, I hope an adult tells the story.

I fought so these children could inherit the citizenship. I fight now so they inherit the truth with it.