A Greek Cabinet official assured a Jewish delegation today that the Athens government abhorred anti-Semitic articles that have appeared in some sections of the Greek press recently in connection with the Cyprus crisis. The delegation of Greek Jewish leaders, headed by Joseph Lovinger, president of the Central Board of Greek Jewish Communities, visited P. Lambrias, Undersecretary of State to the Prime Minister, to express their growing concern over the articles.
They voiced fear that such propaganda could disturb the brotherly relations that have long existed between the Christian and Jewish communities in Greece which had withstood the era of Nazi occupation when non-Jewish Greeks took great risks to protect Jews from the Gestapo. Lambrias responded by declaring that the government considered anti-Semitic articles to be “anti-Greek” and “harmful to the Greek nation.” He stressed that Greek Jews enjoy equal rights with all other citizens and that anti-Jewish discrimination in Greece was “inconceivable.”
The articles referred to apparently stemmed from Greek bitterness over the American role in the Cyprus crisis. The leftist daily “Athenaiki” referred in recent weeks to U.S. Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger as “the German Jew Kissinger” and said that Greece no longer wants to be the “sole means of survival for any more Israels.” The latter was a reference to the use of U.S. bases in Greece in the American military airlift to Israel during the Yom Kippur War.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
