At a solemn dinner in honor of visiting Israeli President Shimon Peres, President Grybauskaitė said that "the middle of the 20th century was painful for the Jewish community in Lithuania, and nobody can make us forget the memory of innocent Holocaust victims."
"We must remember that, for this tragedy not to repeat itself. We must also remember the fact that hundreds of Lithuanians risked their lives and contributed to the rescue of Jews. They were the ones who preserved and passed to our generation the strong spiritual link between the Lithuanian and Jewish nations," the Lithuanian president said.
In her words, the Israeli president's two-day state visit is "a start of a new qualitative stage in the Lithuanian-Israeli relations."
