A Swiss hotel that generated controversy after posting a sign requesting that Jewish guests shower before entering its pool has been removed from a popular travel website.
Guests will no longer be able to make reservations at the Aparthaus Paradies hotel in Arosa through Booking.com, following widespread media coverage of the incident and protests from Jewish organizations.
In an email to journalists on Thursday, Simon Wiesenthal Center director of international affairs Shimon Samuels stated that the website had given in to his organization’s demands.
“We do not tolerate discrimination of any kind. We can confirm that the property in question is no longer available on Booking.com,” Samuels quoted a spokeswoman for the site as saying.
In a letter earlier this week, Samuels had called on the Swiss government to “close [the] hotel of hate and penalize its management.”
The hotel, a popular destination for ultra-Orthodox vacationers, had singled out Jewish guests, threatening to ban them from the pool should they not follow directions regarding bathing. A second poster also singled out Jewish guests, informing them of the hours that they were allowed to access a freezer in a staff area.
Jonathan Kreutner, secretary-general of the Swiss Federation of Jewish Communities, called the sign a “really dumb thing” in an interview with the Associated Press.
"It's somebody who really didn't think a lot,” he said, adding that calls to close the hotel were “very exaggerated,” Kreutner said. “This is the most important thing now: To stay cool. Things happened that are not good. I don’t want to reduce the problem behind this, but it is very important to stay cool.”
Hotel manager Ruth Thomann told local media that she had not intended the missives as anti-Semitic and that they were badly worded responses to complaints by both guests and staff. According to The Guardian, the Paradies’ popularity is a result of its willingness to allow guests to store Kosher food in the staff room freezer.
Thomann said that guests had complained of their Jewish counterparts not using the showers before swimming and that staff had said that guests entering the kitchen without set times was disruptive.
The wording on the posters was “naive,” Thomann said.
Neither the state of Israel nor the Swiss government found these explanations acceptable, however.
Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely contacted the Swiss by way of Ambassador Jacob Keidar to call for an official statement of condemnation from Bern. In response, a Swiss tourism spokesman called the sign unacceptable but added that it "needs to stay in perspective: This is one unfortunate incident.”
