A Romanian pop star is under fire for posting semi-erotic photos of herself posing in half naked in front of a Holocaust memorial in Bucharest late last month, JTA reported.
On August 25th, Xonia, an Australian-Romanian recording artist uploaded the photos showing her posing in provocative positions while wearing a white, buttoned bikini and pink thigh high stockings in front of a monument to the 270,000 Romanian Jews murdered during the Holocaust.
“Focus on your goal, don’t look in any direction but ahead,” she wrote in a message accompanying the photos on Instagram. “Quit complaining and boss up.”
"Completely uneducated low life to film at a memorial to the thousands of people that were gassed to death,” one woman commented on Xonia’s Facebook post of the photos, since removed. The Instagram version remains online, however.
Earlier this year, Israeli-German artist and satirist Shahak Shapira created a website called Yolocaust to shame people posting selfies of themselves laughing or posing inappropriately at Holocaust memorials and concentration camps. Shapira -who is well known for spray painting anti-Semitic tweets that Twitter declined to remove from their platform outside of the social networking company’s Germany headquarters- posted photoshopped copies of the pictures, making it appear as if their subjects were celebrating next to Holocaust victims in the midst of the slaughter.
Disrespect for Holocaust memorials is a significant problem in some parts of Europe.
Last month, a monument to Jewish forced laborers who were murdered during the Second World War was found desecrated in the northwest Hungarian town of Balf. Shortly before that a monument erected to thank the residents of the Bulgarian town of Vidin for preventing the deportation of their Jewish neighbors during the Second World War was defaced with anti-Semitic slogans. And in July, Holocaust memorials were found vandalized in Ukraine and Greece.
