Melbourne’s Croatian club honors fascist

By · April 14, 2008

A Croatian club’s restaurant that honored the country’s fascist World War II leader has enraged the Jewish community.

The Katarina Zrinski restaurant, attached to Footscray’s Croatian Club in Melbourne, hung a giant portrait of Ante Pavelic on its wall Thursday and sold T-shirts of the mass murderer who was responsible for the deaths of about 500,000 Jews, Serbs, Muslims and Gypsies.

April 10 marked the 67th anniversary of Hitler’s establishment of the Nazi puppet regime – the Ustache – in Croatia.

Manny Waks, former executive officer of the B’nai B’rith Anti- Defamation Commission, described the incident as “outrageous and offensive.”

But the club’s president, Tony Juric, told the Herald-Sun newspaper that the fascist leader Pavelic was not connected to the Nazis.

“What the Nazis did was a disgrace and we had nothing to do with that,” he said. “I have never received one letter of complaint from a Jewish or a Serb organization.”

Last year, Blood and Honour, a white supremacist band, held a concert in the Croatian club and Thompson, a Croatian band with alleged neo- Nazi links, also played there.

The Croatian club also recently named one of its buildings in Pavelic’s honor, again irking the Jewish community.