A controversial exhibit comparing the Holocaust of Nazi Germany to conditions faced by animals before slaughter rolled into Salt Lake City Tuesday for a two-hour stop at Washington Square.
The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals exhibit, dubbed "Holocaust on Your Plate," uses an eight-panel pictorial to compare the present-day captivity and slaughter of livestock to the slaughter and captivity of Jews under Adolf Hitler.
"We want people to consider the role they're playing in this cruelty when they sit down to eat," said PETA's youth-outreach coordinator Matt Prescott, who designed the campaign.
One panel called "The Final Indignity" juxtaposes a pile of dead Jews with a pile of dead pigs. Another dubbed "To Animals All People are Nazis" compares Jews in small, closely stacked bunk beds to chickens in coops.
The traveling exhibit, which was in Boise Monday and will be in Grand Junction, Colo., today, drew considerable criticism when PETA unveiled it last February in San Francisco.
"The effort by PETA to compare the deliberate systematic murder of millions of Jews to the issue of animal rights is abhorrent," Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League noted in a statement then. "PETA's effort to seek 'approval' for their 'Holocaust on Your Plate' program is outrageous and takes chutzpah to new heights."
On Tuesday in Salt Lake City, Rabbi Benny Zippel of Chubad Lubavitch of Utah had a similar reaction, saying that "murdering Jews, or for that matter, people during the holocaust was 100 percent in violation of God's will and God's plan for the universe and eating meat is not."
"I think that comparing the people that eat meat to the Germans in the Holocaust is an obscene comparison and it actually belittles the terrible atrocities of the Holocaust," he added.
Prescott, who says he is a Jew and lost relatives in the Holocaust, maintains the exhibit is not designed to offend but rather educate people about insufferable conditions animals sometimes face. Prescott, along with two PETA interns, has taken the exhibit to 30 states. Tuesday from noon to 2 p.m. at Washington Square, the exhibit drew sparse interest. Prescott said he usually takes the exhibit to places like college campuses where there is more pedestrian traffic.
E-mail: bsnyder@desnews.com