A Russian ice cream company has sparked outrage in the Jewish community and an investigation after coming out with an anti-semitic brand of ice cream.
The Slavitsa company made headlines for producing an experimental batch of “Obamka” (“Little Obama”) chocolate ice cream featuring a dark-skinned boy on its wrapper in 2016. Slavitsa, based in the Russian republic of Tatarstan, announced a new batch called “Poor Jew” last week.
“After tasting all this deliciousness, it turns out that our new ice cream taste is not that ‘poor’,” the company said in a Feb. 28 announcement on the Vkontakte social network.
The municipal prosecutor’s office will inspect whether Slavitsa used the name and the Israeli flag legally, its spokesperson told the state-run RIA Novosti news agency on Tuesday.
The leader of the city’s Jewish community, Leonid Shteinberg, said he was “shocked, to put it mildly” with Slavitsa’s latest product.
“First of all, where did they ever see a poor Jew? Secondly, who allowed them to offend national feelings?” Shteinberg was cited as saying by the Tatar-inform.ru news website.
