Source : Perth Now news
A decision by a east German town to ban “stumbling stone” memorials to Holocaust victims has sparked widespread criticism, including from the Israeli ambassador.
Known as “Stolpersteine” in German, the small brass plaques are a familiar sight on streets across the country. Since the 1990s, many towns have embedded the plaques in memory of Jews and other victims of Nazi atrocities.
The local council in Heidenau, a town just outside Dresden, voted this week to ban the plaques from the town’s public roads and pavements in future.
The cross-party motion was brought by councillors from the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) and Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s centre-right Christian Democrats (CDU).
The motion claimed many relatives of Holocaust victims consider the stumbling stones an inappropriate form of remembrance because passers-by walk over them.
Instead, it said commemoration should preferably take place at the Nordfriedhof cemetery, located on the outskirts of the town.
German politicians and members of the country’s Jewish community reacted to the move with outrage.
“I’m ashamed,” Israeli ambassador to Germany Ron Prosor wrote on X, noting that some stumbling stones laid in Germany recall the fates of his own family members.
“Germany needs a clear firewall against anti-Semitism – whether it comes from the right, the left or Islamist circles. Without exception.”
German Education Minister Karin Prien, the first openly Jewish minister in Germany’s post-war history, described the decision as “a scandal.”
Anyone who seeks to relegate places of remembrance of Jewish life to cemeteries is making Jewish people “invisible once again,” she told the Bild tabloid.
Gunter Demnig, the German artist who launched the Stolpersteine project and has personally laid many of the plaques, also condemned the decision.
“Following the AfD’s electoral successes, it was certainly to be expected that something like this would happen,” the 78-year-old said, accusing the CDU of “leaving their Christian roots behind.”
