Dozens of Thessaloniki residents assembled on Monday for a silent protest at the site of a Jewish monument in the city which was vandalized last week.
Its marble slabs, featuring writing in Hebrew, were shattered by an unknown group of vandals on Friday.
The monument at Aristotle University commemorates the large Jewish population of the city which was wiped out during the Holocaust.
The monument is located in a Jewish cemetery which had already been destroyed by the Nazis in 1942.
The most recent act of vandalism, which took place two days before International Holocaust Remembrance Day, was the third time the monument had been defaced. A prior act of desecration occurred just last summer, in July of 2018, when a swastika was spray-painted on the monument.
The University of Thessaloniki was quick to denounce the act of senseless vandalism. In a statement issued last week, it said that “we call upon our community to be vigilant against all incidents of racially-motivated hatred, blind violence and destruction.”
Greece’s foreign ministry issued an official statement on Sunday commemorating the 74th anniversary of International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
“The Jewish communities of Greece suffered irreparably due to the Nazi atrocities, which led to their near-annihilation. The Greek state today pays tribute to the memory of millions of our fellow citizens and foreign Jews who fell victim to the most heinous crime in modern history,” the statement read.