Sign at Swiss hotel directed to 'Jewish guests' draws anger

GENEVA (AP) — Switzerland's tourism office today decried an "unfortunate" incident in which a small Alpine hotel posted a sign asking "Jewish guests" to shower before swimming in the hotel pool.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center demanded the closure of the Paradies Arosa hotel in the eastern town of Arosa, and issued a statement today calling on "the broader Jewish community and their Gentile friends to blacklist this horrific hotel." On Twitter, Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely called for "justice" against the hotel's management.

Officials said the hotel had apologized for the incident and taken the sign down.

Swiss Tourism spokesman Markus Berger called the sign unacceptable, adding: "It always needs to stay in perspective: This is one unfortunate incident."

Under "To our Jewish Guests," the sign read: "Please take a shower before you go swimming. If you break the rules, I am forced to cloes (sic) the swimming pool for you. Thank you for your understanding."

Tzipi Livni, a former Israeli foreign minister, posted an image of the sign on her Facebook page and wrote that "there can be no tolerance and no indifference" to anti-Semitism and racism, in comments that also alluded also to violence around a white supremacist rally in Virginia in the United States.

We "must not let there be a place in the free world for Nazi flags or Ku Klux Klan masks or ugly signs in hotels directed at Jews only," she wrote. "We cannot allow acts of hate against Jews around the world to become normal."

Hotel management did not immediately respond to an email from The Associated Press seeking comment.