VANDALS DEFACE HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL IN ARMENIA

Dec 28, 2007
Union of Councils for Jews in the Former Soviet Union, DC

The way I feel about this is that they might have as well vandalized an Armenian Genocide memorial. I share the pain of every Jew who may read this and promise to spare no effort to remedy this kind of cowardly behaviour.

Unidentified vandals defaced a memorial to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust in central Yerevan, Armenia last week, scrawling a swastika on the simple stone structure and splattering it with black paint, “The Jerusalem Post” reported on December 23.

Rabbi Gershon Burshtein, a Chabad emissary who serves as chief rabbi of the country's small Jewish community, expressed shock upon discovering the vandalism while escorting visitors to the site. After calling the police and local government officials to inform them of the incident, he said, “This is terrible, as there are excellent relations between Jews and Armenians." A senior adviser to Armenian President Robert Kocharian denounced the defacement as "a provocation."

In the past few years, the monument has been defaced and toppled several times. It is located a few blocks north of the centrally-located Republic Square, which is home to a number of government offices. Armenia's Jewish population is estimated at between 300 and 500 people, most of them in the capital Yerevan.

[...]

Note: Above are excerpts from the article. The full article appears here. Clarifications and comments by me are contained in {}. Deletions are marked by [...]. The bold emphasis is mine.