"We plan to agree on criteria based on which LTL 3 million will be distributed among Jews who were victims of occupation regimes in Lithuania. This is a board meeting where decisions on procedures will be made as we want to start that work as soon as possible. The whole work just has to be formalized," Faina Kukliansky, deputy chairwoman of the Jewish Community of Lithuania and a member of the board of the fund, told BNS on Wednesday.
In her words, he board has 12 members and they are all representatives of Lithuanian Jewish organizations. Chairmen of all regional Jewish communities will also attend the meeting.
"The aim of our fund is not to distribute the money to all interested groups but our goal is to, firstly, pay out those 3 millions to victims of occupation regimes, and other funds will be used for the life, culture, and commemoration of historical memory of Lithuanian Jews. And that involves everyone," Kukliansky said.
"Lithuania is the first post-Soviet republic to adopt such a law, and we really hope that other countries will follow. Now this issue is under consideration in Latvia. We are identifying ourselves with other communities and would be very glad if other countries followed Lithuania," the representative of the Jewish Community of Lithuania said.
Simonas Alperavičius, chairman of the Jewish Community of Lithuania, has said government compensations to Lithuanian Jews who survived the Holocaust should be paid out by the end of this year.
Last year, the Lithuanian parliament adopted the Law on Good Will Compensation for the Immovable Property of Jewish Religious Communities. Pursuant to the law, LTL 128 million (EUR 36.5m) will have to be transferred to the fund over a decade. LTL 3 million are allocated for the purpose in this year's budget.
The compensation makes around 30 percent of the value of property owned by Jewish communities and nationalized or expropriated in any other way by Nazi and Soviet regimes.
More than 90 percent of Lithuania's pre-war Jewish community of about 200,000 were annihilated by the Nazis and their local collaborators during World War II. Around 5,000 Jewish people live in Lithuania, according to the Jewish community.
