The anti-Zionist hate graffiti scrawled at the Yad VaShem Holocaust Museum is a “defamation of the name of G-d of the worst level," Holocaust survivor and former Israeli Chief Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau said Monday. He also is chief executive of the Holocaust Museum.

Approximately 10 hate slogans were discovered at the Yad VaShem plaza Monday morning, setting off shock throughout the country over the fact that vandals struck one of the most revered and visited sites in Israel and in the Jewish and even non-Jewish world. Virtually every head of state and leading foreign official visits Yad VaShem.

Rabbi Lau called the graffiti an “idiotic act” and said that the nature of the slogans is not the style of anti-Zionist hareidi religious Jewish groups. He added that only a “deranged Jews” would write such hate slogans praising Hitler.

“Where is the honor to those who sacrificed their lives in the name of HaShem?” he asked rhetorically. “Whoever wrote these idiotic messages calls on the Polish government not to memorialize victims of Auschwitz. It is ugly and sad.”

Police said that an initial investigation points to extremist hareidi religious Jews but they added they have not yet reached a conclusion. Rabbi Lau suggested that whoever was behind the hate attack might have done signed the slogans in the name of hareidi religious Jews as a provocation.  

Diaspora Affairs Minister Yuli Edelstein said, “Spray painting hate slogans at the building that memorializes millions of those murdered is like spitting in the face of the country of those who died.”