Polish Art Museum Features Naked Tag Game in Gas Chamber

Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
(JTA) – A Polish art museum has resumed an art installation featuring a video of naked men and women playing tag in a gas chamber, despite protests by Jews.
This is the second time the Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow has displayed the installation, called “Game of Tag.” The same video also was displayed at an art museum in Estonia before being pulled following protests.
After it made its debut in Krakow, Jewish figures expressed outrage, and last month the museum ended the video installation, which was part of an exhibit being cosponsored with the Israeli Embassy in Poland.
“It is the most disgusting thing I’ve seen in a long time,” Efraim Zuroff, the center’s chief Nazi hunter, told the Post on Thursday. “They lied about it. It is just revolting and a total insult to the victims and anyone with any sense of morality or integrity.”
A museum spokeswoman told the Post that the video is “presented in a discrete enclosure bearing the warning: ‘A controversial work, only for adults.’”
Museum director Maria Anna Potocka sent the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem a letter saying that “to read this film as an insult to the victims of the concentration camps we feel is to misinterpret it,” the Post reported.
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
