Jewish groups have expressed outrage on Friday over news that the unveiling of a Holocaust monument in Kavala, in northern Greece, was delayed because local authorities sought the removal of a Star of David.
The City Council has decided to cancel the unveiling of the monument to the 1,484 Jews of the community who were exterminated during the Nazi occupation of Greece in WWII.
According to the Central Board of Jewish Communities (KIS) in Greece, the Mayor of Kavala objected to the Star of David engraved on the monument and asked for its removal before the monument could be officially presented.
“To object to a Star of David on the monument is morally reprehensible,” said Abraham H. Foxman, National Director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and a Holocaust survivor.
“Kavala’s Jews were killed because they were Jews, and the value of a monument is to make that fact demonstrably clear. The Mayor and the City Council have insulted the memory of victims, the Greek Jewish community, and Jews around the world, and we join with the Greek Jewish community in voicing our outrage,’’ he added.
“There are no words to express adequately our shock and dismay at the news,” said American Jewish Committee (AJC) Executive Director David Harris.
“How can it be that the eternal symbol of the Jewish people – the very symbol that the Nazis required Jews to wear in the death camps and ghettos of Europe during the Second World War – is deemed unfit for public display in Kavala? What gall for the Jewish community to be asked to remove the Star of David as a condition for allowing the monument to be displayed!” he said.
The Secretary General of the Greek Ministry of Culture, Education, and Religious Affairs, Giorgos Kalantzis, said “‘As an Orthodox Christian, I feel deeply insulted by this issue, because it would be as if someone asked us to erase or modify for ‘aesthetic reasons’ the symbol of the cross on the tombs of our grandfathers executed by the Germans.’’