President Rivlin attends Greek Holocaust museum foundation-laying

THESSALONIKI – President Reuven Rivlin and Greece's prime minister have attended a foundation ceremony for a Holocaust museum in the Greek city of Thessaloniki, which lost 97 percent of its Jewish community in German World War II death camps.

Rivlin and Alexis Tsipras symbolically planted two olive trees on the plot.

The scheduled six-story building will be built by 2020, next to the northern city's old railway station, from which some 55,000 Thessaloniki Jews were forced into goods wagons for the camps. About 50,000 died there.

Tsipras said Tuesday the museum will fulfill an old debt for the city, some 40 percent of whose pre-war population was Jewish.