Orthodox Magazine Erases Women From Image Of Auschwitz
Image by Mishpacha.com
By Avital Chizhik-Goldschmidt January 29, 2018
This past week, the popular ultra-Orthodox weekly Mishpacha published a pixelated image of women during the liberation from Auschwitz, in compliance with its graphics policy which forbids pictures of women:
Screenshot of Mishpacha.com Image by Mishpacha.com
The image ran in the magazine’s cover story, “Twin Fates”, written by Aharon Granot, profiling one of the last-surviving Mengele twins: Irene and Rene Guttmann. The magazine cover featured Rene, but not his sister; the story itself included images of Irene as a child only, while Rene was depicted through adulthood.
The pixelation sparked an uproar on social media and in the Israeli press, when Orthodox women’s activist and founder of Chochmat Nashim, Shoshanna Keats-Jaskoll, posted a screenshot of the story on Facebook. “Dear Mishpacha magazine,” she wrote. “…There is nothing holy about this practice. You cannot see how far gone you are. You should be ashamed of yourselves.”
Mishpacha English editor Sruli Besser explained, on his personal Facebook page, that the image was altered by the Hebrew magazine staff. “We wouldn’t have done so,” he wrote. (The English language Mishpacha’s image policy does not allow the alteration of images but rather simply omits them, unlike its more conservative Hebrew sibling, which regularly alters images to omit women.)
“One of the artists in [sic] graphics department…reasoned that the pixelation was done for another reason- not because of gender, but because of a different sensitivity…Her well-meaning mistake was that the image had been ‘enhanced’ to protect the dignity of the subject. That was not the case. The resultant hurt is in place. I would certainly get upset about seeing an image with the holy face of a survivor tampered with.”
The original offensive image shows a woman in a headscarf holding a bundled child, walking behind a nun.
The original image: the liberation of children from Auschwitz-Birkenau. Image by HistClo.com
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
