Breaking ranks with one of the city's most outspoken conservative Jews, Mayor Mike Bloomberg has come out in favor of including all those murdered by the Nazis in a memorial to the victims of the Holocaust.
"We don't value one group more than any other," Bloomberg declared. "It's not only Jews that were massacred,"
Bloomberg's remarks were in response to Assemblyman Dov Hikind's contention that a Sheepshead Bay memorial -- which, the mayor noted, was outside Hikind's district -- should honor only Jewish victims of the Holocaust.
"To include these other groups diminishes their memory," Hikind said in yesterday's New York Post. The politician's mother, Frieda Hikind, survived the death camp at Auschwitz.
Hikind accused the mayor of playing politics and then challenged Bloomberg's ancestral perspective.
"I don't know how many people in his family died in the gas chambers. My grandparents, my uncles, my aunts [did]," Hikind told The Post.
Hikind said he is not against a memorial to honor the other groups -- homosexuals, Gypsies, the mentally ill and disabled, dissidents -- as long as it is somewhere else.
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"These people are not in the same category as Jewish people with regards to the Holocaust," Hikind said Sunday following a press conference at the memorial. "It is so vastly different. You cannot compare political prisoners with Jewish victims."
