The Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece condemned the vandalism of a Holocaust monument on Friday. The monument had been smashed and broken into different pieces.

The monument, created in 2014, is a commemoration of the city’s historic Jewish cemetery on which the university is built consists of a series of gravestones in a bed of grass beside a broken menorah. It is dedicated to the Jewish students killed in Nazi death camps during WWII.

It points to a time when Thessaloniki was a centre of Sephardic Jewry following their expulsion from Spain. Before the Nazis, there had been 55,000 Jews living in the city, however fewer than 2,000 survived.

It is not the first time that the monument has been vandalised, with the last incident having occurred in July when a large cross was painted on it.

The university’s administration condemned the attack as a “shocking racist hate crime”. The public have been called to “be alert when it comes to incidents of racial hatred, violence and destruction.”