News Brief

YouTube has a video showing a teenaged boy urinating on the Holocaust memorial in Rhodes.

The island’s Jewish community and the Jewish Web site www.abravanel.wordpress.com publicized the video, which was uploaded Friday to YouTube.

The Central Jewish Board, the umbrella organization of Greek Jewry, sent a letter to Interior Minister Prokopi Pavlopoulo asking “for extra security for the synagogue in Rhodes in anticipation of large numbers of Jewish tourists during the High Holidays.”

According to a Web site site called Venetoklio high 5, “A secret group of students of the Venetoklio High School of Rhodes … does not digg at all the Jews who wish to turn the island into a second ‘Land of Canaan.’ ”

The site, which features slang and vulgar language, also says: “After all the propaganda fed even in Religion school books, about the ‘chosen people’ and other bull—-, we have decided to take the situation into our own hands and show to everyone with deeds of how much do we really agree with this view.”

The Veneteklio school is one of the oldest in Rhodes, built in 1910, and among the most prestigious in Greece.

Headmaster Giannis Papadomarkakis at first refused to accept the idea that the culprits where his students. But after viewing the Web site, he told JTA, “These kinds of malicious acts do not represent our school. Rest assured that if any of our students are involved I will send them to the local DA for prosecution.”

The monument has been the target of vandalism. Over three days, after its dedication on June 30, 2002, it was defaced by vandals who erased the engraved lettering, cut the barbed wire that was part of the monument and knocked it off its base.

Bystanders during its construction harassed workers by throwing stones and shouting invectives such as “Get out Jews,” “You’ll turn us all into Jews” and “You’ll bring Sharon here,” referring to then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.