A Berlin Holocaust memorial was vandalized with pro-Palestinian and antisemitic graffiti, local police said Thursday.
The graffiti, sprayed across the sandstone monument, said “Jews are committing genocide” in English. The words “Free Palestine,” accompanied by the image of a Palestinian flag, were sprayed on the ground below it. A local tour guide discovered the vandalism on Wednesday, according to the Juedische Allgemeine, a German Jewish publication.
The incident is the latest in which Holocaust memorials and Jewish sites have been hit with pro-Palestinian and antisemitic graffiti since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war on Oct. 7. Earlier this summer, a Seattle Holocaust museum was tagged with pro-Palestinian graffiti, and U.S. synagogues have also been defaced with anti-Israel messages. In the Netherlands last month, a statue of Anne Frank was vandalized with spray paint, and in the fall a mural in Italy honoring Frank was also damaged.
Berlin police called the graffiti antisemitic, and the European Jewish Congress condemned it. The State Security Police agency is investigating.
The Berlin monument, called the “Block of Women,” designed by German Jewish artist Ingeborg Hunzinger and built in 1995, commemorates the non-Jewish women who in 1943 publicly protested against the Nazis when their Jewish husbands and fathers were set to be deported.
“This monument honors the courageous women who, in 1943, protested against the Nazi persecution of their Jewish husbands,” the EJC said in a statement. “This outrageous disrespect of Shoah victims doesn’t advance the Palestinian cause. It is simply unacceptable.”
The 1943 protest was led by non-Jewish women, most of them married to Jewish men who were detained in a building that had formerly functioned as the Jewish Welfare Administration.
Until that point, Jews in mixed marriages had not been immediately targeted for deportation or murder by the Nazi regime, for fear of antagonizing their non-Jewish relatives.
More than 100 women participated in the protests, which lasted for a week until the approximately 2,000 men were released. The protest on Rosenstrasse was the only open demonstration in the face of Nazi authorities on behalf of Jews in wartime Germany, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. The men were once again arrested and then deported to labor camps shortly afterward. About 25 of them were deported to Auschwitz and designated as laborers by the Gestapo.
An inscription on the monument reads: “The strength of civil disobedience; the vigor of love; overcomes the violence of dictatorship; Give us our men back; Women were standing here; defeating death; Jewish men were free.”
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