New Law In Greece, Descendants Of Holocaust Survivors Can Now Apply For Citizenship
Image by wikimedia commons
(JTA) — Greek lawmakers passed a parliamentary amendment that will allow descendants of Holocaust survivors from Greece to apply for citizenship.
The amendment passed on Thursday was praised on Saturday by the head of the country’s Central Board of Jewish Communities, the French news agency AFP reported.
“This is a moral victory,” and a “fresh step forward in the recognition of the history of the Holocaust and of Greek Jews,” Central Board President David Saltiel told AFP.
The Greek government in September 2011 passed an amendment to a new foreign resident law that automatically reinstated Greek citizenship for all Jews that were born in or before 1945. The number of Greek Jews affected by that amendment was about 300. The new amendment affects their descendants, most of whom live in Israel, according to AFP.
The neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party voted against the legislation. It is the fourth largest party in the parliament.
More than 50,000 Jews lived in the Greek city of Thessaloniki before the Holocaust. Some 80 percent were killed by the Nazis or their proxies. Today there are fewer than 5,000 Jews in Greece.
The governments of both Spain and Portugual passed laws of return for Sephardic Jews in recent years as what they consider symbolic rectification for the murder, mass deportations and forced conversions to Christianity of their Jews during the 15th and 16th centuries, during what came to be known as the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisition. Spain reportedly has naturalized more than 4,900 applicants for citizenship by Sephardim since the law went into effect last year.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
