French Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux expressed “horror and sadness” after the discovery Wednesday of anti-Jewish and negationnist inscriptions at a memorial to the deportation and resistance in Marmande, in the Lot-et-Garonne department, southwest of France.
The words “lies,” “Zionism”, “interests” and the dollar sign “$” were inscribed in red paint on the monument which bears the names of Nazi concentration camps, said Gerard Gouzes, Socialist Mayor of Marmande.
“Marmande is shocked,” the mayor said. “It is undoubtedly the act of a Holocaust denier, someone who knows very well what he did.”
According to the Interior minister, the authors of the tags "clearly targeted the memory of the deportees and the Jewish community of France.”
As minister of worships “I am more than ever determined to fight against all the obscurantisms, all racisms and all the forms extremism,” Brice Hortefeux said.
Wednesday’s incident came after several other anti-Semitic acts in the country. Three weeks ago, dozens of Jewish graves were vandalized in eastern France. Vandals smashed or overturned 27 gravestones at the Jewish cemetery of Wolfisheim, near Strasbourg.
More recently, anti-Semitic slogans and Nazi swastikas were discovered on the walls of the Etz Haim synagogue in Melun, central France, and on the frontages and windows of a dozen kosher stores in Paris.
France is home to western Europe's largest Jewish community.
Around 600,000 Jews live in the country.