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| Proposed Holocaust memorial in Ohio |
(Scroll down for video) Shortly after Ohio announced its intention to build a Holocaust memorial, an atheist group announced that they intend to petition a court in order to stop the project, the group said in a statement.
The atheist group based in Wisconsin has expressed opposition to the Holocaust memorial set to be built on the ground of the state legislature of Ohio, arguing that the situation violates the separation of church and state and calls the Star of David "exclusionary", when commemorating victims of the Nazis.
Ohio Governor John Kasich and Holocaust memorial advocates said that the memorial will teach people about man's inhumanity to man and that contrary to the claim of the atheists, the memorial will include all those killed by the Nazis, such as U.S. soldiers, ethnic and religious minorities, homosexuals and the mentally ill.
Joyce Garver Keller, executive director of Jewish Communities, an organization representing Jewish groups across the state, said the memorial is intended "primarily to honor those who had survived and who had come to Ohio to build a new life."
Keller said it is appropriate to build the structure on state grounds because it will "remind policymakers and those working in government about the importance of their role and responsibility regarding hatred, anti-Semitism and genocide."
"The Holocaust did not begin in the concentration camps, furnaces with chimneys and mass graves," Keller said. "It began in the halls of government with the approval of laws aimed against Jews, taking their property, their businesses, their homes, their freedom and ultimately their life.
The Wisconsin-based Freedom From Religion Foundation states that the memorial is discriminatory and has no place on public land.
"The Star of David is a religious symbol that is exclusionary," Dan Barker, a spokesperson for the group, said.
"A secular government is not supposed to have religious support," Barker continued.