Jewish Communities

The Central Board of Jewish Communities (KIS) and Greek Jewry have issued a statement condemning Iran's airborne attacks against Israel on Saturday and expressing solidarity with the people of Israel.

KIS emphasizes Iran's role as an "instigator of global terrorism," citing attacks by Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis.

The Central Board of Jewish Communities (KIS) in Greece issued a statement on Monday decrying a cartoon that appeared in Saturday's edition of Efimerida ton Syntakton, which depicts a gate resembling that of the Auschwitz death camp to make a comment on education reform.

Moisis Elisaf, a prominent doctor in the city of Ioannina, in northwestern Greece, became the country's first Jewish mayor after prevailing in a second round of local authority elections.

Thessaloniki Mayor Yiannis Boutaris said Friday that Jewish monuments will be repaired no matter how many times they are vandalized and urged people not to tolerate vandalism.

The Central Board of Jewish Communities in Greece on Friday issued an announcement decrying the desecration on Wednesday night of the Holocaust Memorial in Thessaloniki.

Unknown vandals have scrawled the name of Greece's neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party in black spray-paint on Thessaloniki's Holocaust Memorial, prompting a reaction from US Ambassador to Greece Geoffrey Pyatt, who is visiting the northern port city, and the municipal council.

The president of the Central Board of Jewish Communities in Greece, David Saltiel, has said that work will soon start on a Holocaust museum in the northern city of Thessaloniki, once home to Greece's largest Jewish community.

A memorial commemorating 1,484 Jews from Kavala who perished in Nazi death camps in World War II, was targeted by vandals on Wednesday night, local media reported.

The vandals appear to have used hammers to smash the marble coating on the memorial, which was erected about a year ago in the northern Greek town.

Authorities and Greece's Jewish community have reacted to the desecration of the synagogue in Ioannina, in northwestern Greece, with swastikas.

"The image of the swastika does not only desecrate the Jewish synagogue; it also desecrates the memory of thousands of fellow men, victims of fascism," Ioannina Mayor Thomas Begas said in a statement.

A deputy of the right-wing anti-austerity junior coalition partner Independent Greeks (ANEL) Dimitris Kammenos on Thursday posted a photo of the infamous Auschwitz sign, “Arbeit macht frei” replaced by “We Stay in Europe”. The post led to friction within the ANEL party between ANEL spokesperson Marina Chrysoveloni and and deputy Dimitris Kammenos who had a terse discussion.