Lithuanian Parliament House
Lithuanian Parliament HouseiStock

Lithuania’s parliament has called on local municipalities to mark all sites of massacres of Jews with monuments and to commit to taking care of Jewish cemeteries.

The announcement came on the 80th anniversary of the start of the Holocaust in Lithuania, the LRT public broadcaster reported.

The resolution was put forward by conservative MP Emanuelis Zinheris and supported by 64 MPs.

The document stated: “It is imperative to continue the search of the identity of Jews killed during the Holocaust to be able to monumentalise massacre places with victims’ names.”

The measure stressed that all monuments and memorial signage for Nazi and Soviet collaborators must be removed from public areas, and called for the honouring of such figures to be removed from the educational curriculum.

The parliament also called for streets, squares and schools to be renamed after Lithuanians and other figures recognized as righteous among the nations.

In Vilnius, officials have been called upon to rename one of the city’s public areas after Chiune Sugihara, a Japanese diplomat who during World War II served as the first vice-consul for Japan in Lithuania. Sugihara saved thousands of Jews by providing them with visas so they could travel through Japan, in the process putting his job, his life and the lives of his family in jeopardy.

Nearly the entire Jewish community of Lithuania – over 95 percent – was murdered in the Holocaust.