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(JTA) — On the final minute, Nazi sympathizers from round Europe had been blocked from marching within the streets of Sofia, Bulgaria’s capital, on Saturday, to honor Hristo Lukov, the World Struggle II-era chief of a Nazi collaborationist group.
The Lukov March had been held by the far-right Bulgarian Nationwide Union-New Democracy Social gathering virtually yearly since 2003 and has turn out to be a rallying level for far-right actions from across the continent.
It has additionally been a galvanizing occasion for counter-protesters. They’d deliberate to carry a “No Nazis on Our Streets” rally exterior Sofia’s Palace of Justice in the course of the march, in accordance with the Sofia Globe. “Despite the organizers’ claims that it’s merely a tribute to a ‘nationwide hero,’ Lukov March has turn out to be the trademark occasion of fascist organizations in Bulgaria,” Antifa Sofia mentioned in a press release to the newspaper. “It normalizes the presence of individuals with clear extremist views.”
Metropolis officers in Sofia had lengthy sought to ban the march however had been often blocked from doing so by the courts. A ban was upheld in 2021, however the march went on in 2022. This yr, metropolis officers in addition to leaders of Bulgaria’s small Jewish neighborhood requested the courtroom to reinstate the ban, which it did on Saturday, hours earlier than nationalists had been set to march with torches by way of town middle.
If the march went on, Alexander Oscar, the chief of the Bulgarian Jewish umbrella group, Shalom, informed the Jewish Telegraphic Company, “will probably be an enormous humiliation for the nation.”
The World Jewish Congress and American Jewish Committee had additionally exhorted the Bulgarian authorities to stop the march.
In canceling the march, “the Bulgarian authorities and Bulgarian civil society have despatched an unequivocal message that antisemitism, racial hatred and all different types of xenophobia and intolerance haven’t any place in up to date Bulgaria,” the WJC mentioned in a press release on Sunday. “In so doing, they’ve set a robust instance, to be emulated by different international locations that face comparable challenges which haven’t any place in up to date Europe.”
The march stands in distinction to Bulgaria’s personal Holocaust historical past, when the nation was one of many few in Jap Europe to largely defend its personal Jews, saving all 48,000 from deportation to Nazi focus camps. Nevertheless, as an ally of Nazi Germany, Bulgaria was concerned in orchestrating the Holocaust within the areas of neighboring Greece and Yugoslavia that it occupied. Greater than 10,000 Jews from these areas had been despatched to their deaths at Treblinka, an act supported by Lukov’s Union of Bulgarian Nationwide Legions.
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