JERUSALEM (EJP)---Yad Vashem welcomed the decision by the Lithuanian authorities to close the case against historian Yitzhak Arad and said it expects that investigations against other Jewish partisans will be summarily dropped.
The Prosecutor General of Lithuania announced last week that it has been decided to close the investigation about suspicions of Arad's involvement in the killing of Lithuanian civilians during the Holocaust as a partisan.
In a statement, the prosecutor's office cited a "failure to collect sufficient data grounding primary suspicions" as its reason for halting its investigation of Lithuanian-born Yitzhak Arad, 81, who worked with Soviet security forces in the wake of World War II.
Yad vashem said it “welcomed this long overdue decision to close the case against Dr Yitzhak Arad, even as Yad Vashem has reservations as to the reasons detailed by the prosecutor for closing the case,that there “was insufficient data to bring the case to court”.
“The criminal investigation into Jewish partisan activities during the Holocaust is a troubling symptom of revisionism that has no place in a country that strives to be a member of the democratic community of nations,” the Holocaust Museum and Institute in Jerusalem said.
It added: “As Yad Vashem Chairman Avner Shalev emphasized in his letter (August 10, 2008) to the Prime Minister of Lithuania, "Only by dealing openly and forthrightly with the full and complex truth about the past will your nation succeed in building for itself a secure and stable future.”
Lithuanian and international Jewish groups were outraged when the prosecutor's office in 2006 began its investigation of Arad, based partially on his memoirs.
Arad, who is a former head of Yad Vashem, rejected allegations of murdering civilians and suggested the legal probe was a vendetta for his own painstaking efforts to record atrocities committed by Lithuanians who collaborated with Nazi Germany during the war.