Artist Shahak Shapira cleverly shames crass tourists who take shallow selfies at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin
The 28-year-old has created a website called 'Yolocaust' where he contrasts photographs of people smiling, juggling and doing yoga with the horrors of the concentration camps
A BERLIN-based Israeli writer has launched an art project satirising the disrespectful behaviour of selfie-loving tourists climbing on a Holocaust memorial.
Shahak Shapira, 28, has created a website called 'Yolocaust' where he contrasts photographs of people smiling, juggling and doing yoga with the horrors of the concentration camps.
The thoughtless selfies are juxtaposed next to startling archive wartime images to show just how absurd the actions of the social-media obsessed youngsters are.
The memorial, which was erected in Berlin to commemorate the millions of murdered Jewish people, is formed of 2,711 concrete slabs arranged in a grid pattern on a sloping field.
Every day hundreds of visitors are seen taking selfies, with many even climbing on the stones and dancing around.
Many of the pictures, which have been shared on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, are captioned "jumping on dead jews" or with the hashtag "yolocaust" - a portmanteau of "yolo" (You Only Live Once) and the Holocaust.
Shapira was born in Tel Aviv but has been living in Berlin for almost 15 years.
He gained notoriety on New Year's Eve 2015 after he filmed six young people grumbling anti-Semitic slogans in the underground of Berlin. He was later beaten up by the mob.
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While the young men were Muslims, he did not want to politicise the incident and called a general condemnation against Islam and Muslims "racist".
Shapira also wrote a book on how he became the "most German Jew in the world".
His new project, the 'Yolocaust' is unexpectedly well-timed and comes a day after politician Bjoern Hocke of the anti-immigration AfD ("Alternatives for Germany") broke with the postwar political consensus by complaining that “we Germans are the only people in the world that have planted a monument of shame in the heart of their capital”.
Shapira has taken the images from social media sites without permission of the users.
A note at the bottom of the website informs people in the pictures they can ask for their image to be removed by sending him an email.
Since launching his website, Shapira has received and followed up one request for removal.
Shapira hopes the project will encourage people to think about the Holocaust and find appropriate ways to commemorate its legacy.
