Weight-Loss Ad Mocks Holocaust Victims
An Estonian weekly newspaper ran a mock ad for weight loss pills using a photo of prisoners at a Nazi concentration camp, raising the ire of the country’s Jewish community.
The fake ad appeared in the humor section of the Eesti Ekspress, according to reports.
It was designed to make fun of a recent ad for an Estonian gas company, which used a photo of the front gate of Auschwitz to sell its product, Sulev Vedler, deputy editor of the newspaper, told the Associated Press.
Vedler told the AP that the ad was not meant to “target” Jewish people.
The ad was denounced by the Estonian Jewish community and by the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem.
The website of the Estonian company GasTerm Eesti on Aug. 23 published a photograph of the front gate of the Nazi death camp with the famous inscription “Arbeit macht frei,” or “work makes you free.” The caption read “Gas heating – flexible, convenient, and effective.”
The next day the photo was removed from the site and an apology was posted.
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