ATHENS (EJP)—The Greek parliament has voted an amendment to a law that will allow descendants of Holocaust survivors from Greece to apply for citizenship.
The amendment corrects a legal vacuum created by a law adopted in 2011 that automatically reinstated Greek citizenship for Jews who were born in or before 1945.
It will now be possible for the descendants of the deceased Greek Jews to reestablish ties with their country of origin, where their fathers or grandfathers had lived until the War and the Holocaust, or after that. The new amendment concerns relatives of those survivors, many of whom live in Israel.
"This is a moral victory and a fresh step forward in the recognition of the history of the Holocaust and of Greek Jews," said David Saltiel, president of the Central Board of Jewish Communities (KIS).
The neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party voted against the legislation. It is the fourth largest party in the parliament.
Thursday's vote has since become a political controversy with Greek opposition New Democracy (ND) party abstaining from the the procedure while neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn which happens to be the fourth biggest in parliament, voted against the legislation.
The leftist Greek government sharply criticized New Democracy for abstaining but the ND later countered that it backs the measure and attributed its abstention to confusion during the voting.
More than 50,000 Jews lived in the northern Greek city of Thessaloniki (Salonika) before the Holocaust. Some 80 percent were killed by the Nazis or their proxies. In January the Jewish community in Thessaloniki finally got the go-ahead to build a Holocaust museum – partly funded by Germany – to commemorate the over 50,000 members of the Greek Jewish community that lived in the city before the Nazi occupation.
Today there are around 4,000 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.