Switzerland condemns racism, anti-Semitism and discrimination in any form, a spokesman for the government said on Tuesday, as a row with Israel over a hotel sign telling Jewish guests to shower before using the pool showed no sign of abating.
The Swiss statement came after the Jewish state lodged official complaints about Aparthaus Paradies in the Alpine resort village of Arosa and signs it posted telling Jewish guests to shower before using the swimming pool and restricted their access to a kitchen freezer.
The hotel quickly apologized and removed the signage after a public backlash.
As Breitbart Jerusalem reported, Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely issued a statement expressing her outrage at the signs. She called it “an antisemitic act of the worst and ugliest kind.”
Jacob Keidar, Israel’s ambassador to Switzerland, reportedly contacted the hotel and later informed Hotovely that the signs had been removed.
Swiss Tourism spokesman Markus Berger 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.
He said that calls to close the hotel were “very exaggerated.”
“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.”
Meanwhile, the prominent Jewish rights group, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, published a letter Tuesday demanding that Switzerland “close the hotel of hate and penalise its management.” It also called on Booking.com to remove the hotel from its directory “and explain the anti-Semitic cause of the removal on your website.”
The centre’s head of international relations Shimon Samuels, pointed out that “the reference to ‘showers’ can be construed as a patently vicious reference to the fake shower hands in the gas chambers.”
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