Belgian mayor defends carnival float featuring Jews with money and a rat

by Cnaan Liphshiz

(JTA) — The mayor of the Belgian city whose annual parade featured puppets of Jews and a rat atop money bags defended the display, telling the local media that “In Aalst it should be allowed.”

Christoph D’Haese told the Het Laatste Nieuws newspaper that “it’s not up to the mayor to forbid” such displays, and that “the carnival participants had no sinister intentions.”

Jewish groups and international organizations including the European Commission condemned Sunday’s float at the Aalst Cranaval.

“It is unthinkable that such imagery is being paraded on European streets 70 years after the Holocaust,” a spokesperson from the European Commission, the executive branch of the European Union, told reporters on Tuesday, according to Het Laatste Nieuws.

Also on Feb 5, B’nai B’rith International issued a statement saying the organization “is disgusted with the anti-Semitic puppets” that were on display. The Simon Wiesenthal Center’s director for international relations, Shimon Samuels, wrote to a Belgian Cabinet minister saying that his group is “sickened” by the display.

The float, titled “Shabbat Year,” was prepared by the Vismooil’n carnival group. It featured two giant puppets with sidelocks and streimels, hats favored by some Orthodox Jews, in pink suits. One is grinning while smoking a cigar. That puppet has a white rat on his right shoulder. Both puppets are standing on gold coins and have money bags at their feet.

On a wheeled platform directly behind the float, several dozen people dressed like the puppets danced to a song about full coffers that are “Jewishly beautiful” and about “getting extra fat.”

The annual carnival featuring the display was added in 2010 to the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, or UNESCO. The organization has not replied to numerous critical questions about the Aalst event on social media and on Tuesday had not issued any statement on the subject.

A spokesperson for the carnival group told a blogger last month that the display was meant to address how “everything has become so expensive.”

The carnival group’s president did not immediately reply to a request for comment by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

Vismooil’n created the display as its 2019 theme for the Aalst carnival, the local edition of celebrations that take place throughout parts of Europe and Latin America annually in anticipation of Lent, the 40-day period before Easter. Participants prepare floats and dance routines, parading them through town on Carnaval.

In 2013, a different group designed a float resembling a Nazi railway wagon used to transport Jews to death camps. The people who designed the float, known as the FTP Group, marched nearby dressed as Nazi SS officers and haredi Orthodox Jews. A poster on the wagon showed Flemish Belgian politicians dressed as Nazis and holding canisters labeled as containing Zyklon B, the poison used by the Nazis to exterminate Jews in gas chambers in the Holocaust. UNESCO condemned that display.