Steve Lipman for The Jewish Week
A municipal-funded memorial
to gay victims of the Holocaust, both Jews and non-Jews, was inaugurated
on Tuesday in Tel Aviv’s Meir Park, according to Haaretz. It is the
country’s first.
The memorial in front of a community center is
the creation of attorney Eran Lev, an activist in the gay community who
was a city councilman for Meretz. “It’s important to me that people
understand that persecution of gay people was not the usual story of the
Holocaust that we know from the final solution, and from the Wannsee
Conference,” he told Haaretz. “This is a different story, more modest,
but still an important one. It’s important that people in Israel know
that the Nazis persecuted others as well, not because they were Jews,
but because they were gay.”
The memorial consists of three
triangles – the symbol of the gay community, Haaretz reported. On each a
sentence is written in Hebrew, English and German: “In memory of those
persecuted by the Nazi regime for their sexual orientation and gender
identity.”
An inscription states that special steps were taken
against gay people and that “according to Nazi ideology, homosexuality
was considered harmful to ‘public health.’ The Gestapo had a special
unit to fight
homosexuals and the ‘Center for the Fighting of
Homosexuality and Abortions’ kept a secret file on about 100,000
homosexuals.”
An estimated 15,000 gay people in the Third Reich were sent to concentration camps and more than half were murdered.
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