Europe remembers its murdered Jews, but does it listen to living ones? - opinion

The gates are gone. So are most of the people who once passed through them. On a quiet street in Kaunas, Lithuania, a small memorial marks the entrance to the Jewish ghetto established here in 1941.

Behind it stands a residential building, its walls covered in colorful geometric patterns. Someone has left a few stones at the foot of the memorial. People live here now. They come home from work, carry their shopping upstairs, and go about their lives. I wonder how often they stop to think about what happened on this street.

Before the Holocaust, Kaunas was home to some 37,000 Jews. By August 1941, nearly 30,000 had been forced into the ghetto. Most were murdered by the Nazis and their Lithuanian collaborators. Only a few thousand survived.

Later this month, Kaunas will mark 85 years since the Great Action of October 28-29, 1941, when some 9,200 Jews, including 4,273 children, were selected and then murdered at the Ninth Fort.

I have visited many Holocaust memorials over the years. Yet standing before this modest marker, I found myself thinking less about the past than about the present.

Europe has invested enormous effort in remembering its murdered Jews. Museums, memorials, and Holocaust education have become part of European public life. All of this matters deeply. But why does a continent so committed to remembering dead Jews sometimes struggle to listen to living ones?

The dead make no political demands. They do not criticize European governments or challenge European Union (EU) institutions. Living Jews do. So do Israelis, whose relationship with Europe has always involved disagreement, disappointment, and sometimes genuine affection.

European Jews and Israelis are not the same community. European Jews should never have to defend an Israeli government or answer for its decisions. Yet both encounter, in different ways, a Europe that sometimes seems more comfortable with Jewish history than with Jewish voices today.

For European Jews, this is painfully real. A 2024 survey by the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights found that, at least occasionally, 76% of Jewish respondents concealed their Jewish identity, while 75% felt that people in their country blamed them for the Israeli government’s actions because they were Jewish. The survey was conducted before October 7, 2023.

Think about what those numbers mean. Everyday choices become questions of personal safety. These concerns accompanied me to the annual conference of the European Association of Israel Studies, held in Kaunas this month.

The conference offered something increasingly precious: people willing to listen to arguments they might strongly oppose. Scholars discussed Israeli democracy, Palestine, antisemitism, Holocaust memory, and Israel’s relationship with Europe.

Arab citizens of Israel were among the presenters. A researcher from the University of Haifa examined restrictions on spatial planning in Israel following October 7. Others addressed Jewish-Arab relations, academic boycotts, and the challenges of teaching Israel in European classrooms.

I did not agree with everything I heard. But agreement was never the point.

Yet elsewhere in Europe, the channels for such exchanges are narrowing. In June 2025, Erasmus University Rotterdam froze institutional cooperation with Bar-Ilan University, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the University of Haifa after an independent committee warned of risks of complicity in human rights violations. Student exchanges were suspended, and new institutional research collaborations halted.

Universities have a responsibility to examine their partnerships, particularly during a war that has caused such terrible suffering in Gaza. Those moral questions are real and cannot simply be brushed aside. But making academic contact harder does not make difficult political questions easier to answer.

The University of Haifa is among the institutions affected by Rotterdam’s decision. One of its researchers, an Arab citizen of Israel, could still present his work in Kaunas. But what of the students who might have studied abroad, the young researchers who could have worked together, and the conversations lost when institutional connections are severed?

Some of those missing conversations might have challenged Israeli government policies more forcefully than anything said from a distance.

Blaming European Jews for Israel’s actions and questioning partnerships with Israeli universities are not the same thing. But neither should mean treating people as proxies for a government. Europe does not become more principled by narrowing academic exchange. It becomes less equipped to understand a society whose decisions affect Israelis, Palestinians, and Europeans alike.

Another encounter in Kaunas captured the complexity of Europe’s relationship with its Jews. Lea Goldberg, one of the great poets of modern Hebrew literature, looks down from a mural. She grew up in Kaunas before immigrating to Palestine in 1935.

Beside her portrait appears her poem “Pine,” in Hebrew and Lithuanian. It speaks of two landscapes, two places that feel like home, and the difficulty of belonging entirely to either.

Goldberg’s memories of Lithuania were complicated. In 1919, as her family returned from wartime displacement, her father was detained and severely mistreated. He never fully recovered.

I was glad Kaunas remembered her. But I wondered how she might have felt about being celebrated in a place that had given her both a childhood and painful memories.

The ghetto memorial and Goldberg’s portrait tell different stories. One recalls a Jewish world that was destroyed. The other reminds us that Jewish life continued elsewhere, including in Israel. Neither story is simple. Neither should be.

Civil discussions with people of different views

Our hosts at Vytautas Magnus University welcomed us warmly. We could criticize Israeli government policies, discuss Palestinian suffering, disagree about history, and still sit together over coffee. Nobody needed to pretend our disagreements were small.

After years of attending academic conferences, I never expected to feel grateful simply because people with different views could sit in the same room and talk. In Kaunas, I did.

At the ghetto memorial, I thought again about the families who once lived in these streets. They were Europeans. They went to school, fell in love, and made plans for the future. Some probably wanted to leave. Others could not imagine living anywhere else. They did not know they would one day be remembered primarily for how they died.

Jewish life in Europe was never only a story of loss, and it is not one today. Israel cannot replace the Jewish Europe that disappeared. Nor should European Jews be treated as representatives of Israel. Both deserve to be encountered as people, not as symbols in arguments others have already settled.

I am grateful for Europe’s memorials, museums, and ceremonies. I want future generations to visit them – and to understand that the people we remember were once living Europeans, with opinions, fears, ambitions, and disagreements of their own.

The stones at the Kaunas memorial honor people who can no longer speak. Listening to those who can would be another way of honoring their memory.

The writer is a senior fellow at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev at the Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI) and a professor of European studies and international relations in the Department of Politics and Government at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.