Holocaust monument vigil calls for end to hate crimes
Vigil held the week after solemn memorial was defaced with red paint
Prayers filled the air at the National Holocaust Monument Sunday at a vigil held one week after the solemn concrete memorial was defaced with paint.
The monument on the Kichi Zibi Mikan near Lebreton Flats was found splashed with red paint on the morning of June 9, with the words "feed me" painted in capital letters.
It's still not clear who defaced it or what their motivations were.
The slogan appeared to be a reference to Gaza, which the United Nations described earlier this month as the "hungriest place on Earth."
The vandalism was condemned by several high-profile Ottawans as an act of antisemitism, including Ottawa Centre MP Yasir Naqvi, Ottawa Centre MPP Catherine McKenney and Lawrence Greenspon, a prominent Ottawa defence lawyer and co-chair of the National Holocaust Monument Committee.
At Sunday's gathering, Greenspon called the vandalism both a "terrible happening for the Jewish community" and also incredibly personally painful.
"The idea of today's interfaith vigil was to basically say that there's no place — [and] this is especially true here, at the National Holocaust Monument — that there's no place for this kind of hate crime to take place," said Greenspon, whose father was a holocaust survivor.
"It's unfortunately a sign of the times ... there is a rise of antisemitism, and this hate crime is just the tip of the iceberg."
Calls for unity
In addition to members of the Jewish community, Sunday's vigil featured a Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg elder who delivered remarks to the crowd.
Several Christian groups were also in attendance.
"We have to unite with our brothers and sisters who are suffering to make sure that in Canada there's no hatred ... like there was here at the monument, unfortunately," said Yvan Mathieu, auxiliary bishop with the Archdiocese of Ottawa–Cornwall.
"I don't understand why people do this. You can be against many things — for instance, any act of violence [or] war today — but it's not by creating gestures of hatred and violence like this that you will solve anything."
The Ottawa Police Service's hate and bias crime unit has been investigating the vandalism and has asked anyone with information about what happened to reach out.
With files from Ben Andrews and Campbell MacDiarmid