Croatia’s capital city pledges to erect a Holocaust memorial monument, but local Jews say they’ll have nothing to do with it as it does not mention local complicity.
“There is no place for a monument to six million Jewish in Zagreb and Croatia because such a monument already exists in Berlin,” the Jewish Community of Zagreb said last week in a statement about the municipality’s decision on June 4 to erect the monument.
“European countries have marked the killings of Jews on their respective territories with monuments and memorials,” the statement reads.
The organized Jewish community of Croatia is boycotting government-sponsored Holocaust commemoration events since 2016, citing what communal leaders say is a state-led effort to rehabilitate the Ustasha, a fascist movement led by Ante Pavelić that murdered hundreds of thousands of Serbs and tens of thousands of Jews during World War II.
Adolf Hitler, left, with Croatia’s Vice Chief of State and Minister of Defense Slavko Kvaternik, to his left, and other Nazi officials in 1941. (Heinrich Hoffmann/ullstein bild via Getty Images/via JTA)
In 2016, Croatian President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic posed during a trip to Canada with an Ustasha flag. The previous year in Israel she expressed her “deepest regrets” to victims “killed at the hands of the collaborationist Ustasha regime.”
— JTA
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