A hotel has sparked an international anti-Semitism row after a staff member told an Israeli guest: ‘Sorry, there are no Jews allowed in our hotel.’
The chilling email was sent by Hotel Zum Hirschen, in the Bavarian town of Lam, in response to a booking enquiry from Jewish tourist Michael Winokur, who was planning a two-night stay with his family.
The message prompted a diplomatic incident, with Israeli officials and German politicians lining up to condemn the family-run business – which was immediately banned from Booking.com in a move its staff described as ‘a huge problem’ for the business.
Talya Lador-Fresher, Israel’s Consul General for southern Germany, posted a screenshot of the message asking: ‘Are we back in the 1930s?’ While Germany’s anti-Semitism commissioner branded the hotel ‘an abyss of anti-Semitism’.
But hotel manager Andreas Vogl claimed the business was not anti-Semitic – before moaning that he and his staff, not the Jewish guest, were the real victims of the row.
‘It’s just awful,’ he told The Mail on Sunday. ‘I’m just getting threats and phone calls. We just want some peace and to be able to work normally again.
‘There is absolutely no hatred and absolutely no anti-Semitism or hatred against any population groups from our side. We’re now being labelled as anti-Semites and Jew-haters, even though we’re not at all. That’s the absurdity of the whole thing.
‘We keep getting fake bookings on Booking.com, and then suddenly there was one from Israel which had all the tell-tale signs of being fake.
An email was sent by Hotel Zum Hirschen, in the Bavarian town of Lam, to an Israeli guest which sparked an anti-Semitism row
‘So we wrote back in less than half a minute, and that sentence just slipped out – but not because we don’t take Jews into our hotel. That’s nonsense. We don’t exclude anyone at all.’
The hotel issued a written apology to Mr Winokur describing the message as ‘inexcusable’.
It also invited him and his family to stay free of charge for a week to ‘see for yourself that we are not bad people who discriminate.’
Mr Winokur was not available for comment.
