In November 1998, the Jewish community of Salonika celebrates the first anniversary of the monument to Holocaust victims in their city. This month also marks the first anniversary of the death of the creator of this brilliant monument. Professor Nandor Glid, the sculptor who created the most unique holocaust monument erected in Greece to this date, passed away shortly before his piece was erected in its site. The monument was instead completed by his sons Daniel and Gabriel Glid, in the city that lost 96% of its Jewish population in the Shoah. 

The erection of the monument was undertaken on the occasion of the year 1997, when Salonika was declared the Cultural Capital of Europe. Following a national competition, announced in December 1996 by the Greek Ministry of Culture, department of the Arts and Erection of Monuments, which failed to bare a winner, the late Prof. Glid was invited to create the monument. The site chosen for the monument was a street intersection, near the pre-World War II Jewish quarter 151. 

During World War II Prof. Glid who was born in Yugoslavia in 1924, was taken to Szeged for forced labor, while his family was liquidated in 1944 at Auschwitz. He later fought on the side of the partisans until he was wounded in March 1945 at Bolman. He was awarded the Order of National Merit in 1972. He became a professor at the Academy of Applied Arts in Belgrade in 1975, and elected as chairman, and then rector of Belgrade University of Arts in 1979 and 1985 respectively. He exhibited his work widely. Among his monuments are those at Mauthausen, Zavala (Bosnia, 1958), The Ballad of the Hanged (Subotica, 1967), Dahau (1968), Yad Vashem monument (Jerusalem, 1979), and the monument of the Jewish victims of the genocide in Belgrade, on the bank of the Danube (1990). This last served as the model for the monument in Salonika. The Salonika monument to the victims of the Holocaust is in the form of a fire and a menorah, which rises from the ground on a tubular base, then springs out in an intricate composition that resembles bodies, until it reaches the sky, with the bodies transformed into birds with open wing - a very beautiful gesture and a very elegant composition in bronze. 
Kol haKEHILA extend our condolences to the Glid family, and wish well to his sons Daniel and Gabriel Glid, who executed this brilliant monument on behalf of their father, based on his design and wish.