Israel
acknowledges gay Holocaust victims for first time

Gays and lesbians in Israel have been invited to participate in Holocaust memorial services for the first time. Two members of Jerusalem Open House, the LGBT center, placed a wreath in the name of the gay community at the foot of the Warsaw Ghetto rebellion monument at Yad Vashem, the memorial to the millions who were exterminated by the Nazis. The Nazi regime was responsible for the murder of millions of Jews in the Holocaust. Among the other minorities that were pursued by the Nazis were gay people, who were systematically persecuted. The Nazis required what they called "sexual deviants" to wear the pink triangle. Under Paragraph 175 of the German penal code, which banned sexual intimacy between members of the same sex, an untold number of gays and lesbians were rounded up by the Nazis and send to concentration camps, where they were subjected to medical experiments, including lobotomies, and forced to work in labor camps. The number of gays sent to the camps ranges from 5,000 to 15,000, many of them having been sent to the gas chambers. (Sirius OutQ News)