(JTA) — The Central Board of Jewish Communities in Greece haS condemned the vandalizing of a Holocaust memorial in Thessaloniki, according to the English-language Greek newspaper Neos Kosmos. During a rally of hundreds of thousands of Greek citizens in the city against the use of the name Macedonia by the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, supporters of the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn Party spray painted their party’s logo on the city’s Holocaust Memorial. Also during the rally, anti-Semitic leaflets were posted in a city square calling Thessaloniki Mayor Yiannis Boutaris a “slave of the Jews”.
A statement by the board said, “They did not desecrate just the memory of the 50,000 Jews of Thessaloniki, the 65,000 Jews of Greece, the 6,000,000 Jews of Europe deported and exterminated by the Nazis in the German concentration camps. They desecrated the values of democracy itself, the very civilization of a city, and proved that the remnants of Nazism still have roots in our country. Roots that - if not eradicated by society - might spread even more, guiding us again in the darkest period of world history.” The monument was also recently vandalized with “Free Palestine” graffiti.