Vilnius (AFP) – Israel’s prime minister said on Sunday that Jews were still at risk even decades after the Holocaust as he wrapped up a groundbreaking visit to Lithuania, a Baltic state once home to his forefathers.
“For the Jewish people, what has changed in these 75 years? Not the attempts to destroy us, they still seek to destroy us,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told around 300 Lithuanian Jews gathered in Vilnius’s Choral Synagogue.
The Israeli leader identified what he termed new existential threats facing the Jews, with Iran and the Islamist movement Hamas which runs the Gaza Strip being among them.
“What has changed is our ability to defend ourselves by ourselves… This is a magnificent change of history,” added Netanyahu, who is the first-ever Israeli premier to visit Lithuania, a Baltic EU state.
Pre-war Lithuania was home to a thriving Jewish community of more than 200,000 people, with Vilnius a hub of learning known as the “Jerusalem of the North”.
But historians contend that around 195,000 perished at the hands of the Nazis and local collaborators under the 1941-44 German occupation, nearly the entire Jewish population.
Today there are around 3,000 Jews living in the EU and NATO member state of 2.9 million people.
Netanyahu said he spent Saturday touring the Vilna Ghetto and recalling Lithuanian Jews taken to Paneriai — also known as Ponar or Ponary — on the outskirts of the city, the site of the Ponar massacre.
