Vilnius  - Israeli experts Wednesday launched a 10-day research project to determine if newly constructed offices and apartments sit on an old Jewish cemetery in Lithuania's capital.

Questions about the site's past have caused international controversy. Lithuanian Jews, who opposed the construction work, say the site was a 15th century cemetery. Developers dispute their claim.

Protests from abroad include a letter from then-U. S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. The US House Foreign Affairs Committee passed a resolution in February condemning the construction on the possible cemetery site.

Last year, Jews from across Europe rallied in protest outside the headquarters of European Union institutions in Brussels.

The Jewish community in Vilnius - called the Jerusalem of Europe - was almost wiped in the Holocaust during the World War II, when 6 million Jews died at the hands of Germany's Nazi regime.

Czarist Russian authorities shut down the cemetery in 1831 and partly built over it. In the 1950s, the Soviets built a stadium and concert hall on part of the site, allowing the remains of the Vilna Gaon, a famous 18th-century Jewish rabbi and scholar, to be removed. (dpa)