Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Greek Jewish Lawmaker Says Golden Dawn Would Send Her to ‘Concentration Camp’

Greek lawmaker warned her colleagues that if the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party comes to power it would send her and her family to the crematoria because of her Jewish ancestry.

Anna Asimakopoulou, the spokesperson for the ruling New Democracy party, made the comments last week during a stormy debate in Parliament on lifting immunity from several jailed Golden Dawn leaders.

During the debate held June 4, Christos Pappas, the deputy leader of Golden Dawn, turned to Asimakopoulou and pointed out that she had an American-Jewish mother.

Pappas said he raised the issue to illustrate that the fact she had been allowed to shop in his store, which proved that Golden Dawn were not anti-Semitic, but only anti-Zionist.

Asimakopoulou reacted angrily to the comments, asking what kind of lawmaker raises the ethnic and religious backgrounds of other parliamentarians.

“If this man were in power, not only would my mother, myself and my son not be allowed to enter his shop, but they would put us on trains and send us to concentration camps before sending us to the crematoria,” she said.

The Greek government has led a crackdown on Golden Dawn, in recent months jailing several of its leaders and accusing them of running a criminal organization.

But the effort has not diminished public support for the group, which has been blamed for dozens of violent attacks on immigrants in Greece.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.