Wiesenthal
Center-Israel head tells editor, ‘I do not think that you
understand the problem’
The deputy editor-in-chief of the Estonian weekly newspaper Eesti Ekspress apologized
on Monday for publishing a mock ad depicting emaciated prisoners
at a Nazi concentration camp.
Sulev Vedler said that the ad, for weight-loss pills, was meant to be “ironic,”
and that the intended target of the joke was the Estonian
gas company GasTerm Eesti, which in August used a picture
on their website of the front gate of the Nazi death camp
Auschwitz to sell their products.
“Using such a photo seemed completely
inappropriate to Eesti Ekspress,” said Vedler. “The ridicule
was not at the expense of any nation or anyone who has suffered
in concentration camps, but at the expense of the Estonian
company in question.”
Vedler apologized to “people who were
offended by this ironic joke.”
The director of the Simon Wiesenthal
Center-Israel Office, Efraim Zuroff, told Vedler that the
apology was not enough and showed a lack of understanding.
“Frankly, I do not think that you
understand the problem,” he wrote to the editor in response
to the apology.
Zuroff said that the Holocaust is
not a subject for satire, particularly “not in a country
in which local Nazi collaborators assisted the Nazis in mass
murder, and Waffen-SS veterans… are considered freedom fighters
and Estonian heroes.”
Zuroff, who raised the original complaint
about the joke ad, was pilloried in the same newspaper in
2011 when he was leading the fight to bring suspected Nazi
war criminal Harry Mannil to trial. Eesti Ekspress at the
time ran a caricature of Zuroff as the devil.
Following the publication of the offending
weight-loss ad, Alla Jakobson, spokeswoman for Estonia’s
Jewish community, said in the newspaper Postimees that the
incident shows Estonian society is experiencing “major problems
with moral and ethical values.” timesofisrael.com
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