Thessaloniki Mayor Yannis Boutaris who prevailed comfortably in May’s local elections, winning 58.1% of the vote, wore a yellow Star of David badge for his swearing-in ceremony on Thursday, in order to express his anti-fascist sentiments against the presence of far-right Golden Dawn MP Artemis Matthaiopoulos on the municipal council.

The badge was in fact a pamphlet handed out by Town Councilor Eleana Iaonnidou, who was elected with the Green party, that featured the Star of David and the word “Jude” (Jew in German). The yellow badge symbolized a cloth patch that Jews were ordered to sew on their outer garments to mark them as Jews in public during WWII.

During the swearing-in ceremony, leftist protesters exchanged chants and insults with Golden Dawn supporters who sat in the opposite public gallery at the municipal council.

After a while, Mayor Boutaris pleaded with both sides to calm down, telling them that “the municipal council is not a coffee house or a soccer stadium.”

It should be noted that the history of the Jews of Thessaloniki, (Greece) reaches back two thousand years. The city of Thessaloniki was home to a major Jewish community, mostly of Sephardic origin, until the middle of the Second World War.
In 1943 the Nazis occupying Greece forced the Jews in Thessaloniki into a ghetto near the rail lines, and started deporting them to concentration and labor camps, where most of the 60,000 deported died. This resulted in the near-extermination of the community. Only 1200 Jews live in the city today.

Video source: thestival.gr