(JTA) — The Central Board of Jewish Communities in Greece have condemned the vandalizing of a Holocaust Memorial in Thessaloniki.

“Merely a week before the International Holocaust Remembrance Day followers of the Nazi party in Greece stated their presence by desecrating the Holocaust Monument in Thessaloniki with their repulsive signature,” the central board said in a statement, the English-language Greek newspaper Neos Kosmos reported.

“They did not desecrate just the memory of the 50,000 Jews of Thessaloniki, the 65,000 Jews of Greece, the 6,000,000 Jews of Europe deported and exterminated by the Nazis in the German concentration camps. They desecrated the values of democracy itself, the very civilization of a city, and proved that the remnants of Nazism have still roots in our country. Roots that -if not eradicated by society- might spread even more guiding us again in the darkest period of world history,” according to the statement.

During a rally of hundreds of thousands of Greek citizens in the city against the use of the name Macedonia by the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, supporters of the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn Party spray painted their party’s logo on the city’s Holocaust Memorial.

Also during the rally, anti-Semitic leaflets were posted in a city square calling Thessaloniki Mayor Yiannis Boutaris a “slave of the Jews.”

The memorial erected in Eleftherias Square is a bronze sculpture depicting a menorah with human bodies intertwined into the flames of its candles.

The Thessaloniki municipal council, in a statement called the vandalism a “condemnable act that once more illustrates the bigotry and violence of the neo-Nazi ideology,” which needs to be treated with “zero tolerance,” the daily newspaper Kathimerini reported.

The monument recently was vandalized with “Free Palestine” graffiti.

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