Uruguayan Holocaust memorial vandalized with antisemitic slurs
RIO DE JANEIRO (JTA) – A Uruguayan Holocaust memorial rededicated last year was vandalized with antisemitic graffiti minimizing the Holocaust.
“They have vandalized us again. What’s going on?” Montevideo Mayor Carlos Varela tweeted, along with photos of the vandalized memorial. “We call for sanity, tolerance and peace.”
Unveiled in 1994, the site in the country’s capital has been hit several times in recent years by antisemitic vandalism. This time was the most severe, however, with the graffiti taking up a larger area of the memorial, reported the El Pais newspaper.
Vandals used black paint to write slurs such as “The Holocaust of the Jewish people is the biggest lie in history,” “Only 300,000 Jews died from typhus” and “Gas chambers were a fraud.”
In 2016, the Israelite Central Committee or Uruguay – the country’s umbrella Jewish organization – funded the latest restoration, which included lights and staircases.
“We repudiate the antisemitic graffiti with concepts that deny the Holocaust of the Jewish people. The monument is a memory exercise to never forget the criminal regime that pursued and systematically murdered six million Jews [only] for the... fact of their existence,” read a statement released by the committee.
“Today, our pain is large and we are ashamed before the survivors of the massacre that are still among us, their children, grandchildren and all the Jewish people. Our country, which is democratic and pluralistic, the melting pot of cultures, does not deserve such atrocities,” the statement said.
Last month, an evangelical Christian pastor from Uruguay fulfilled his promise to plant 1,000 trees in Israel.
In March, Uruguayan Jews paid tribute to the memory of David Fremd, a 55-year-old businessman who was stabbed to death a year earlier by a Muslim convert in the small town of Paysandu. The killer reportedly yelled “God is great” in Arabic and later declared that he “followed Allah’s order.”
Uruguay is home to about 12,000 Jews, according to the Latin American Jewish Congress. It was the first country in South America to officially recognize Israel.