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.
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
