Holocaust Museum LA Knew What Lithuania Was Doing

Lithuania has repeatedly used a survivor-founded museum as cover for Holocaust distortion. The museum was warned, and kept providing the platform.

On June 11, the Government of Lithuania used Holocaust Museum LA’s reopening to claim “Lithuania’s place” in Holocaust memory. The museum had been warned, in writing, about exactly this. It welcomed Lithuania anyway.

The reopening deserves praise. After a major expansion, the survivor-founded institution opened the Goldrich Cultural Center, with new galleries, theaters, gardens, and a pavilion built around an authentic Holocaust-era railcar. Its inaugural exhibition, The Beautiful Game… The Untold Story, recovers the forgotten influence of Jewish players and coaches on modern soccer. The problem is not the exhibition. It is what the museum let the Government of Lithuania do with it.

The Lithuanian Consulate in Los Angeles announced that its deputy consul general and a staff member had attended the June reopening, praised chief executive Beth Kean, and then delivered the sentence the post was written for. The consulate said that Lithuanian artifacts in the exhibition “further underscore Lithuania’s place within the broader narrative of European Jewish heritage and the Holocaust.”

That phrase sounds inclusive. It performs a conversion. The Jewish civilization destroyed in Lithuania becomes part of Lithuania’s heritage; the destruction becomes a vague “experience”; and the state’s relationship to the Holocaust turns from a question of responsibility into a credential of belonging. The artifacts belong to Lithuanian Jews. They do not belong to the diplomatic reputation of the modern Lithuanian state.

What the consulate omitted

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum records that German forces and Lithuanian auxiliaries began the killing in June and July 1941, that Lithuanians carried out anti-Jewish riots, and that most rural Jews had been slaughtered by the end of August. More than ninety percent of Lithuania’s Jews were murdered. No country in occupied Europe murdered a higher proportion of its Jewish population. Most were killed close to home, in forests and pits near the towns where they had lived, and Lithuanians, police, and local officials were integral to the speed and reach of the slaughter. That local role is not a footnote. It is a principal element of the Holocaust in Lithuania.

The consulate’s post contains none of it. No perpetrators, no collaborators, no ghettos, no pits, no honors still paid to implicated men. It offers heritage, experience, and “Lithuania’s place.” The IHRA working definition, which Lithuania has adopted, treats the minimizing of the Holocaust’s principal elements, the role of collaborators among them, as distortion. Distortion rarely denies that the Holocaust happened. It selects what may be remembered and omits what must be confronted. The murdered are nationalized; the murderers disappear.

Holocaust Museum LA knew

The museum cannot claim surprise. This was not Lithuania’s first use of it. In 2020, Holocaust Museum LA joined the Lithuanian Consulate and Foreign Ministry in honoring Lithuanian rescuers, an event that foregrounded Lithuanian righteousness while omitting the scale of Lithuanian collaboration, and lent that selective narrative the authority of a survivor-founded institution.

Notice followed. On December 22, 2024, Beth Kean’s museum address was on an email circulating an ICAN statement that named Lithuania and Jonas Noreika as a case of state-sponsored Holocaust distortion. On March 11, 2026, her address was again included when I circulated Silvia Foti’s account of her grandfather, Noreika, “Exception of 1 in 2,500 Becomes National Irony.” The decisive notice came on April 16, 2026, when I wrote to Kean directly and sent her my sixteen-page letter to Congressman Brad Sherman, on which Holocaust Museum LA was itself a named recipient. She did not reply.

On June 15, 2026, I contacted Kean again and gave her a written opportunity to respond before publication. She did not respond.

The non-response is on the contemporaneous record. On May 25, 2026, I wrote to a colleague: “Remember how we tried to follow it up with Beth Kean at HMLA and she wouldn’t even respond to us?”

The warnings changed nothing. Weeks later, Holocaust Museum LA joined an AJC Los Angeles meeting with a senior Lithuanian delegation, where AJC named HMLA, ADL, and the Jewish Federation as partners. Then Lithuanian diplomats were welcomed into the museum’s reopening, where they praised Kean and claimed “Lithuania’s place” in Holocaust memory. The 2020 ceremony, the May 2026 meeting, the June 2026 reopening: three uses of a survivor-founded museum’s authority, each after notice, not before. That silence, in my view, made continued participation a choice. Lithuania supplied the distortion; the museum supplied the credibility that let it pass as remembrance.

Why this cannot stay private

I did not begin in public. I wrote to Kean directly, and the door closed. I am one private individual. I sued the Lithuanian state’s Genocide Centre over its rehabilitation of Noreika, through the Lithuanian courts and the European Court of Human Rights, at my own expense, and in May 2026 I filed a formal petition with the IHRA to review Lithuania’s membership, again at my own cost. I have no endowment and no board. Holocaust Museum LA has both, and used them to give a stage to the government I have spent years and my own money holding to account.

A private letter that is ignored protects only the institution ignoring it, so this is written for publication. Why is a survivor-founded museum deliberately and repeatedly platforming Lithuania, after written notice of what Lithuania is doing, when one unfunded citizen had to take that same state to court alone?

The speech Lithuania prosecutes is speech a Holocaust institution made

While Holocaust Museum LA stands beside it, Lithuania is criminally prosecuting Artur Fridman, a Jewish citizen, under a 220-page indictment, for a Facebook post written at his grandfather’s grave that questioned the heroization of Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas. He has been barred from leaving Lithuania since January 2025 and faces possible imprisonment. The Simon Wiesenthal Center, headquartered about four miles from Holocaust Museum LA, opposed honoring Ramanauskas-Vanagas; in 2017 its veteran Nazi-hunter and historian Dr. Efraim Zuroff met members of the parliamentary committee that had moved to honor him and urged them to drop it, stating that Ramanauskas’s wartime leadership of a unit that persecuted the Jews of Druskininkai disqualified him from being a national hero. The Wiesenthal Center took its objections to the Lithuanian parliament. Holocaust Museum LA welcomed Lithuania to Los Angeles.

So the criticism Lithuania is prosecuting a Jew for making is criticism a major Holocaust organization placed on the record years earlier. A Holocaust museum exists to defend that truth-telling and to protect those punished for it. Under Beth Kean, Holocaust Museum LA instead lends its prestige to the state doing the punishing. That forces one question, and the museum should answer it. Is it representing the Republic of Lithuania, or the Jews Lithuania murdered? It cannot do both. There is no neutral ground between the government that prosecutes Holocaust speech and the people that government’s predecessors helped destroy.

The mission, and what the museum must do

Holocaust Museum LA says its mission is to commemorate, educate, and teach critical thinking, summed up on its homepage as “Inspire Humanity Through Truth.” Did it ask the Lithuanian delegation to acknowledge the role of Lithuanian collaborators? Did it ask why the state’s historical institution still sanitizes implicated figures, or raise the Fridman prosecution, or set any condition on the use of its name and Kean’s? If the answer is no, the failure is not one Facebook post. It is a failure of due diligence. Hospitality is not neutrality when a government arrives seeking absolution, and silence is not neutrality when the omitted fact is local participation in mass murder.

The board of Holocaust Museum LA, not only its chief executive, is responsible for the institution’s conduct. Its members should be asked individually whether they endorse this record.

The museum should state publicly that the consulate’s description was incomplete and misleading, and that Lithuania’s “place” in Holocaust history includes the near-total murder of its Jews, the scale of local collaboration, and the state’s continuing protection of implicated figures. It should demand that Lithuania say so plainly, remove state honors from collaborators, repudiate the Genocide Centre’s rehabilitation of Noreika, and end the Fridman prosecution. Until then it should suspend co-branded programs and staged appearances that Lithuania can present as Jewish endorsement. These are not open-ended requests: the museum should respond within thirty days of publication, after which silence is its position. Its board should adopt a standard barring co-branding with any state under active Holocaust-distortion scrutiny absent that state’s written acknowledgment of its own role. I am asking the board to convene and vote on whether to continue co-branded engagement with the Lithuanian government absent the conditions above, and to publish the result. And the Jewish press should ask Beth Kean directly, and keep asking, why Holocaust Museum LA keeps engaging with Lithuania.

Jona Goldrich, the survivor co-founder for whom the new center is named, said he was ‘fighting against forgetting.’ Forgetting is not only the disappearance of victims. It is also the disappearance of perpetrators. Holocaust Museum LA was warned, repeatedly. Lithuania used it, repeatedly. The museum’s task now is to reverse the use of its name: tell the truth Lithuania omitted, demand Lithuania do the same, and refuse further service as a shield until it does.