1 Offended by photographs of naked Jewish women being marched to their deaths by the Nazis, ultra-Orthodox Jews say they will build their own Holocaust memorial unless the state museum takes down the pictures.
2 The Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial has rejected the request. Many Israelis, meanwhile, worried the latest religion-based controversy would deepen an already huge chasm between devout and secular Jews here.
3 'The Holocaust is a national and historic trauma and a split over it could create an irrevocable rift in our people,' Culture Minister Shulamit Aloni of the liberal Meretz party said.
4 Dov Shilansky, a right-wing legislator and concentration camp survivor, said the Holocaust was 'a sacred memory that shouldn't be reduced to street bargaining.'
5 The controversy arose amid heightened interest in the World War II slaughter of some six million Jews after last month's 50th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp in Poland.
6 Haim Miller, a deputy mayor of Jerusalem and member of the religious party Agudat Israel, said visitors to Yad Vashem complained to him recently about several photographs of naked women being led to pits to be shot to death or to gas chambers.
7 He said that the photographs were too immodest, leading many religious people to avoid the museum.
8 'It is unacceptable for many people to come and see these women, who were humiliated to begin with, continue to be humiliated by these pictures placed in public view,' Miller said in an interview.
9 Miller said Yad Vashem has been asked to take down the three or four offensive photographs. Otherwise, he said, the ultra-Orthodox will consider asking the city for a place to build their own Holocaust museum.
10 'The photographs show the way in which millions of Holocaust victims were brought to their deaths. We have no reason or authority to cover up the horrible truth or gloss over it,' a Yad Vashem statement responded.
11 The dispute reflected the divide between most Israelis, who are either secular of moderately observant, and the ultra-Orthodox, set apart by their black dress and devout lifestyle. While only an estimated 10 percent of Israel's 4.5 million Jews are ultra-Orthodox, they have attained influence often resented by many other Israelis.
12 Efraim Zuroff, spokesman for the Israeli office of the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, which hunts Nazi war criminals, was enraged by the assault on Yad Vashem, one of Israel's most honored institutions.
13 'It's absolutely scandalous,' said Zuroff. 'It would be a total betrayal of the victims by trying to visually minimize the impact of the horror of the crimes.'
14 'The thing that's offensive here is the crime, not the fact these women are standing naked,' Zuroff said.
15 He argued that by removing the pictures, Israel would also be boosting those who deny the Holocaust ever happened. 'They'll say, `You see, the Jews also have trouble with these pictures.''
16 Some Israelis were sympathetic. Dov Levin, who studies and teaches about the Holocaust at Jerusalem's Hebrew University, said he also had second thoughts about including nude shots of women in books he has written.
17 'The thought is that it could be your mother or your sister. They already humiliated her once, and it's as though we are repeating the crime,' said Levin, a survivor of the Lithuanian Jewish ghetto of Kovno. He added that he decided it was better to explain the photographs than censor them.

Offended by photographs of naked Jewish women being marched to their deaths by the Nazis , ultra - Orthodox Jews say they will build their own Holocaust memorial unless the state museum takes down the pictures .
Offended
Why do these photos offend the Orthodox Jewish community?