A decision by a German city to ban the “Stolpersteine,” a form of memorial dedicated to Holocaust victims, drew widespread criticism on Friday, including from Israel’s ambassador, according to Deutsche Welle.
Known as “Stolpersteine” in German, the small brass plaques are common on streets across the country. Embedded in sidewalks, usually in front of the victim’s last known residence, they bear the names and fates of Jews and other people persecuted by the Nazi regime and have become one of the most visible forms of Holocaust remembrance in Germany.
The Heidenau city council, a town on the outskirts of Dresden, voted on Thursday night to ban, in the future, the memorial plaques on public streets and sidewalks in the town.
The cross-party motion was presented by councilors from the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s party.
The motion stated that many relatives of Holocaust victims consider the “Stolpersteine” an inappropriate form of remembrance because passers-by walk over them.
Instead, the text said, the tributes should preferably take place at the Nordfriedhof cemetery, located on the outskirts of the eastern German city.
However, German politicians and members of the country’s Jewish community reacted to the measure with indignation.
“I am ashamed,” wrote Israel’s ambassador to Germany, Ron Prosor, on X, noting that some Stolpersteine installed in Germany recall the fate of members of his own family. “Germany needs a clear barrier against anti-Semitism, whether it comes from the right, the left, or Islamist circles. Without exception.”
The German Minister of Education, Karin Prien, the first openly Jewish female minister in the country’s postwar history, called the decision “an scandal.”
Anyone who seeks to relegate the sites of memory of Jewish life to cemeteries is making Jews “invisible once again,” she told the German tabloid Bild.
