Lithuania goes back on pledge to convert sports complex into Jewish heritage site

JTA — A Jewish group is outraged by Lithuania’s plans to convert a sports complex into a convention center at the site of a historic Jewish cemetery, a decision that undercuts decades of advocacy to commemorate the memorial site.

The Snipiskes Jewish Cemetery, currently buried beneath the Soviet-era Vilnius Sports Palace, has long been a source of contention between the government and Jewish groups that sought to preserve the memory of the Jews buried there.

In recent years, a working group that included Rabbi Andrew Baker, the American Jewish Committee’s director of international Jewish affairs, came to an agreement with a previous Lithuanian government to have the complex converted into a Jewish heritage site.

But Lithuanian Prime Minister Gintautas Paluckas’s announcement last week of a convention center, despite his pledge to “preserve attention to both the significance of this place for Lithuanian history and the memory of the events that marked it,” appears to have undermined those efforts.

“This reverses an internationally endorsed decision of the previous government which rightly committed to transforming the site into a place of Jewish remembrance and education,” wrote the AJC in a post on X on Friday, saying it was “shocked” by the decision.

AJC added that the decision “raises serious questions and casts a shadow over Lithuania’s stated commitment to Holocaust memory and Jewish heritage.”

AJC is shocked by the Lithuanian government’s surprise announcement to convert the former Vilnius Sports Palace—located in the heart of the Snipiskes Jewish Cemetery—into a conference center.

This reverses an internationally -endorsed decision of the previous government which… pic.twitter.com/Esacf4rGNh

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— American Jewish Committee (@AJCGlobal) July 25, 2025

The cemetery contains the remains of countless Jewish luminaries who lived in the city, then called Vilna, which was, before the Holocaust, known as the “Jerusalem of Lithuania” for its scholarship and piety. It included the burial site of the 18th-century sage known as the Vilna Gaon, whose remains were exhumed in 1949 before the Soviets destroyed the graveyard.

Baker said that Lithuania’s previous government, which was led by prime minister Ingrida Šimonytė, had agreed to the proposal to renovate the Soviet sports complex into a Jewish heritage site, but the new government’s approach felt “cavalier” and “offensive.”

“I think people who’ve been involved in this are angered, are upset and feel betrayed,” Baker told JTA. “This was a long process to come up with a consensus on what should be done with the structure after, for many years, it was contested.”

According to the Made in Vilnius news site, Paluckas’s announcement stipulated that the previous proposal recommended by the Lithuanian Jewish community and the European Committee for the Preservation of Jewish Cemeteries would be honored. But Baker said it would merely add “some description of the fact that this was a Jewish cemetery.”

“This would just somehow be to say, ‘We’re going to turn it into a conference center, but somewhere we’ll let people know this was a Jewish cemetery,’ which is surely totally unacceptable,” said Baker. “It’s not any solution.”

Baker said that he had been in touch with the US ambassador to Lithuania about the new plans for the sports complex, and hoped that the prime minister would reverse his decision.

“Turning it into a convention or conference center, with the sort of activities that would take place in such a spot, would be considered a desecration and an outrage and would not bode well,” said Baker.