A monument honouring the homosexual men and women who were persecuted due to their sexual orientation and perished during the Holocaust is to be established in Meir Garden in Tel Aviv, says Tel Aviv's Mayor Ron Huldai. The proposed design is an iron triangle on which the victims' names will be inscribed, reports Israel's Ynetnews.com. A quarter of a million gays and lesbians were persecuted during the Holocaust, and tens of thousands were murdered because the Nazi Party believed their sexual preference to be deviant. In the concentration camps in which they were imprisoned, gay men were forced to wear a pink triangle while lesbian women wore a black patch. Plans for the monument's erection were initiated by Itai Pinkas, a LGBT community leader and member of the Tel Aviv Municipality City Council who serves as the mayor's advisor in matters of the gay community. The monument is to be the first in Israel to commemorate these victims, though four of its kind exist worldwide - in Sydney, Copenhagen, Berlin, and Amsterdam.