European and North American human rights activists may have thought that the Lithuanian newspaper Vakaro žinios (‘The Evening News’) could not outdo its past antisemitic sensations, but the 21 December 2011 full front page with a huge banner headline ‘THE JEWS’ may herald a new low in the series of 1930s grade disseminations of hate against Lithuania’s tiny and shrinking Jewish minority (around 95% of the country’s Jewish population was killed during the Holocaust).

Lithuanian antisemitism watchdog defendinghistory.com carried the story, together with a full PDF of the article and a full English translation.

The article’s huge banner headline ‘THE JEWS’ is followed by much smaller ‘See No Need to Pay their Social Security Taxes’, giving the impression that ‘the Jews’ are responsible for the country’s economic woes. The rest of the page contains a large photograph of Chabad rabbi Sholom-Ber Krinsky, a native of Boston, in his usual rabbinic attire. Rabbi Krinsky, who has been a full-time resident rabbi in Vilnius since 1994, officiates at the Chabad synagogue and religious center in the Lithuanian capital.

The Chabad school, Beis Menachem, is singled out for its difficulties in paying up in a large page one spread which includes the information that Western Union is even more behind in payments. In the continuation of the article, there is a list of the ten major entities that are behind in social security tax payments. Lo and behold, Chabad and Beis Menachem are not among the major non-payers.

As of today, there has been no public comment by the leaders of the Center for East European Jewish Studies, the Vilnius Yiddish Institute, the Jewish Cultural and Information Center, the Vilnius Jewish Public Library, any politician or diplomat, or any of the human rights centers in the country.

A Lithuanian community leader who did not wish to be named told the Algemeiner “this is yellow journalism and the story has been paid for, what needs to be looked into is who paid for it and why.”