Reina Sofia Museum Outrage As Jewish Visitors Expelled
Three elderly Israeli women, including a Holocaust survivor were expelled last Saturday from Madrid´s Reina Sofía museum after staff objected to them wearing Star of David necklaces.
The three elderly tourists had been earlier aggressively harassed by some museum visitors and staff decided to remove them, because the museum said other “visitors were disturbed that they are Jewish.”
The Reina Sofía, considered one of Spain´s leading art galleries and which houses Picasso´s Guernika, held an exhibition during the Israel-Hamas war titled “From the River to the Sea” in solidarity with Palestinians and has hosted numerous anti-Israel protests since the savage attack by the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas terrorist group which triggered the current war in Gaza.
According to Spanish media reports, the three women, one of them a Holocaust survivor of Hungarian origin, arrived at the museum accompanied by a Spanish woman who recorded the incident on video. Several visitors reacted angrily to the Jewish symbols the women were wearing, calling them, among other insults, “crazy child killers.”
Instead of receiving assistance from museum staff, a senior official at the institution instructed a security guard to remove the group from the museum, while no action was taken against those who allegedly harassed them.
Released video footage shows the museum guard demanding that the women leave. The guard also told the women to conceal the Jewish symbols, claiming they were not permitted to display them publicly.
The companion, a Madrid resident, said that “it is unacceptable for someone to be punished in this way without having broken any law, in an official institution supported by the Spanish government.”
She added that the women “were wearing completely standard Jewish symbols that are not offensive at all. It is like someone wearing a shirt of their favourite soccer team or carrying their national flag. But from the moment we arrived and they noticed the Jewish symbols; the museum staff treated us with hostility.”
The incident is the latest in a string of anti-semitic attacks in Spain.
