Vandals struck the Jewish community center in Vilnius. The perpetrators spray-painted the Lithuanian center’s walls and windows Sunday morning with a swastika and other anti-Semitic epithets. A police investigation is under way. The center’s managing director, Simonas Gurevicius, in a statement said he was ”deeply concerned over repeated incidents of anti-Semitism.” Gurevicius said the local and national governments were too passive in responding to earlier vandalism. “Also, the lack of ethnic and religious understanding teaching in the school system provides fertile ground for intolerance,” the statement said. Gurevicius said the attack “is most likely in response to recent scandalous articles in the press related to the Snipiskes cemetery research,†referring to construction on the site. The American Jewish Committee called on Lithuanian leaders to condemn the attack.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.