A CARNIVAL parade that featured men and women dressed up as Jewish Holocaust victims and Nazi soldiers has been denounced by Israel’s ambassador to Spain.
Rodica Radian-Gordon said in a tweet that the performance was ‘a detestable banalization of the Holocaust’, an ‘affront to the victims’ and ‘an intolerable manifestation of anti-Semitism’.
Shocking: Man wearing uniform of a Nazi SS officer PICTURE: REUTERS
The offensive costumes were worn on Monday at the annual carnival in Campo de Criptana, a town of 13,000 people in central Spain.
They included two women dressed in ‘revealing’ Nazi soldier outfits leading a man in striped pyjamas, while others pretended to be internees as they carried Israeli flags.
A group of men marched along in replica uniforms of SS officers. They all danced to loud dance music played from a float with two towers on it resembling death-camp smokestacks.
Spain’s minister of foreign affairs, Arancha Gonzalez Laya, said on Twitter that she was ‘horrified by the performance’. After contacting the organisers, she said they have apologised to the Federation of Jewish Communities in Spain. The troupe, known as Asociacion Cultural El Chaparral, has said it won’t be repeating its performance.
According to a sign on one of its floats, the association intended its act to be a commemoration of the ‘6million Jewish men, women and children who perished in the Holocaust and all those who suffered persecution and extermination because of their race, sexual orientation, religion, ethnic origin or political ideas’.
It later said in a statement that it had failed to deliver ‘the message of awareness and respect that we had wanted to transmit’.
Earlier this week, a carnival in Belgium faced criticism after stereotypical depictions of Jews for the second year in a row.
