A Swiss hotel has come under fire for posting an antisemitic sign telling its Jewish guests to shower before swimming in the hotel pool.
Under the headline “To our Jewish Guests,” the sign at the Paradies Arosa hotel read: “Please take a shower before you go swimming. If you break the rules, I am forced to close (sic) the swimming pool for you. Thank you for your understanding.”
Swiss tourism officials have said the hotel in the eastern town of Arosa had apologised for the incident and taken the sign down. But anger in the Jewish community still remains.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center demanded the closure of the Paradies Arosa hotel, and issued a statement calling on “the broader Jewish community and their Gentile friends to blacklist this horrific hotel.”
On Twitter, Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely called for “justice” against the hotel’s management.
Tzipi Livni, a former Israeli foreign minister, posted an image of the sign on her Facebook page and wrote that “there can be no tolerance and no indifference” to anti-Semitism and racism, in comments that also alluded also to violence around a white supremacist rally in Virginia in the United States.
We “must not let there be a place in the free world for Nazi flags or Ku Klux Klan masks or ugly signs in hotels directed at Jews only,” she wrote.
“We cannot allow acts of hate against Jews around the world to become normal.”
Swiss Tourism spokesman Markus Berger called said the incident was “unfortunate” but that it should “stay in perspective”.
He cited a recent trend of Orthodox and other Jews travelling to four Alpine villages in the area in the summertime, including Davos of World Economic Forum fame. Although the tourism office didn’t know the origin of the trend, Mr Berger said that numbers “definitely in the thousands” have grown in recent years, adding that many hotels in the area serve kosher food, and that Jewish guests “feel well-treated” there.
“It’s just this one lady at this one hotel who was not on top of the situation,” Mr Berger said. “It’s an isolated incident that doesn’t need for greater action to be taken.”
The secretary-general of the Swiss Federation of Jewish Communities said it was “really a dumb thing” to do, but he also called for calm.
“It’s somebody who really didn’t think a lot,” Jonathan Kreutner said in a phone interview with the Associated Press.

source: news.com.au