Anne Frank in a keffiyah outrages Europe’s Jewish community

(JTA) - When pictures of a mural in Norway depicting Anne Frank wearing a keffiyeh began circulating online this week, Jewish voices swiftly denounced it as a hateful form of anti-Israel protest.

“Depicting a Holocaust victim with a keffiyeh is a gross distortion of history,” the European Jewish Congress wrote in a statement. “Such acts are not genuine criticism but deeply antisemitic and offensive misrepresentations that undermine Holocaust memory.”

But the mural’s creator, the anonymous Norwegian street artist Töddel, is defending the work, telling the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that they chose Frank for the mural precisely because of their respect for the history of the Holocaust.

Töddel said they were not Jewish but had read Frank’s diary several times and visited the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camps with their children.

“Anne Frank is a symbol of innocence,” the artist said. “Like the children and women of Gaza, she suffered and died because of her ethnicity and religion and being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Titled “Death of the Innocent,” the mural went up this week in Bergen, a city on Norway’s southwest coast where two local universities recently severed ties with Israeli institutions over the war. (The city of approximately 300,000 does not have a synagogue but does have a small Jewish community that has recently started organizing events.) Töddel revealed the piece on social media on Monday, along with hashtags reading “#stoptheviolence” and “#humanitynow.”

Unlike some critics of Israel’s war in Gaza, Töddel does not view Israel as uniquely to blame for the current war. “Hamas started it all with its horrific terrorist attack,” the artist said.