waiter… there’s a jew in my soup

Holocaust tourism. Cultural appropriation and the vampiric meet at the crossroads between bagel and lox and hiding in the sewer for your life.It’s tempting to say this is an Oslo Accords “price tag” to pay and pinning the gall to run restaurants like this based on Left secular elite policies in Israel which bash the religious, Judaism, and the disapora tradition in general as deeply embedded in everyday discourse as anti-semitism was in Eastern Europe. But this seems to be of a more pernicious and insidious sort, the worst example of a number of establishments making money off the back of their long and often tragically departed Jewish citizenry.

The clientele  “At the Golden Rose” tavern in the city center of Lviv, or Lvov to some, and Lemberg to others,  are treated to Klezmer music, given traditional black hats with black sidelocks to wear and are obliged to haggle over the price of their meal, to jew them down so to speak. Hopefully, there’s a Golem biding his time in the cemetery waiting to enact justice…..

( see link at end) …According to Dr Ephraim Zuroff, the Nazi-hunter and a director of the human rights organisation the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, “At the Golden Rose” is one of two antisemitic eating establishments in the city of Lviv, where three group B matches are to be played….

Dr Zuroff said that the restaurant gives guests hats with peyot attached when they arrive, and avoids citing prices on the menu so that people have to “haggle” on payment. At another restaurant, “Kryvika”, customers are welcomed into a room that is reminiscent of a Nazi-era bunker, after greeting waiters with the password “Glory to the Ukraine.”

“By patronising these restaurants, football fans will be unwittingly supporting the most extreme and dangerous elements of Ukrainian society,” said Dr Zuroff. “They will be insulting the memory of tens of thousands of Holocaust victims murdered in Lviv by the Nazis and their Ukrainian collaborators, a message diametrically opposed to the goals of Euro 2012.”…

His warning came as it emerged that a Second World War Jewish burial site had been desecrated in Rivne, which is about 200 kilometres away from Lviv. Read More:http://www.thejc.com/news/world-news/68649/dress-orthodox-jew-restaurant-euro-2012-city-lviv-ukraine

ADDENDUM:

( see link at end) …But when the Nazis stormed into the country and took control of Lvov, in June, 1941, extremely harsh anti-Jewish measures were immediately put into action. During the summer, thousands of Lvov Jews were killed during a series of massacres. By December, 1941, the Nazis forced the city’s 150,000 Jews i

the newly established ghetto and brutality accelerated with murder, violence and terror.

The Nazis enacted their usual pattern of confiscation of Jewish property, personal humiliations and deprivations of every sort, forced labor, and deportation to KZ camps. The Ghetto’s last few thousand inhabitants were removed in June 1943 after the rest had been deported to extermination in death camp Belzec.

But the Chiger family miraculously managed to escape the liquidation of the ghetto by hiding in stench and darkness in the sewage-filled sewers of Lvov for 14 months amid rats, filth, and the constant pounding of rushing water. When heavy rain fell, the water nearly reached the ceiling of the sewer and Krystyna and Pawelek’s parents had to hold their children above the waterline so they could breathe. They had to pick off each day’s lice and cope with dysentery.

The Chiger family found an unlikely savior in a seemingly ordinary Polish sewer worker, Leopold Socha, a former black-marketeer who brought them food every day, always by different manholes so as not to arouse suspicion. He also brought them a Jewish prayer book which he had found in the now deserted ghetto.

For months the Chiger family faced the constant danger of discovery but they survived in the sewer hide-out until liberation. On the day of the German surrender Leopold Socha brought those in hiding vodka to celebrate. Read More:http://www.auschwitz.dk/Chiger.htm
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In the essay, I described how I own several miniature figurines of Jews — two marzipan “Yeshiva bochers” that I bought at a kosher pastry shop in Budapest, and a tiny “Jew” clutching a coin that was given out as a sort of party favor to guests at the “Jewish style” Anatewka restaurant in Lodz, Poland. The figures all are caricaturish, but the bochers were destined for an internal (Jewish) market, and the little Jewish man was destined for mainly non-Jewish (Polish) consumers.

Boundaries between insider and outsider, believer and non-believer, devotee and ironic observer can sharply delineate the differences between kitsch and caricature, art and artifice, stereotype and homage. But perspectives shift, and the boundaries often blur. The images and their meaning are often decidedly in the eye of the beholder. And they are frequently dictated by changing religious realities, philo-Semitic, often engineered nostalgia, and the powerful exigencies of the marketplace.

Many of the markers identified with Jewishness have religious overtones that have long laid the basis for both anti-Semitic stereotypes and nostalgic yearning for the “authentic” Jewish experience of the East European shtetl.

Signs and symbols of Jewish holidays and domestic observance, and the beards, side curls, black hats, yarmulkas, fringes and other outward trappings of the traditional orthodox or Chasidic Jew spell “Jewish” — even to Jews — in a way that, for example, the physical attributes of Jews such as the actress Natalie Portman or the actor Kirk Douglas do not….Read More:http://jewish-heritage-travel.blogspot.ca/2008/11/playing-with-stereotypes-brokeback.html