Israeli real estate firm, Be'emunah, has issued an apology after being slammed for their racist online ad posted on Facebook.
"The Be'emunah company wishes to apologize for the offensive clip uploaded to the Internet this morning," said the company in their statement. "The company has always served the public, and the hurtful message in the video is not our way and is against our values. The clip was removed immediately by order of the company management, and a process of soul-searching and clarification began in order to understand how the clip was approved."
According to a report by the Jerusalem Post, the 88-minute video shows an Ashkenazi family lighting Hanukka candles and singing songs when their Mizrahi Jew neighbors come knocking on their doors asking if they have extra 'sugar.' The neighbor saw the Hanukka celebration and called out to his companion. They came inside the house and wondered aloud-why the family is having barbecue inside their home.
A voice-over cuts through the scene saying, "Do you also dream of your own home? Would you like neighbors who are to your liking?" This is when the new housing project of Be'emunah in the Karmei Gat neighborhood of Kiryat Gat gets introduced.
In a report by the Times of Israel, Nerya Rafael Knafo, secretary of the right-wing religious Jewish Home party, said that he was happy that the video came out because it might help those who viewed it to reflect on what went wrong.
"I am so happy that this clip came out, because as blunt, ridiculous and extreme as it is, it may also bring us to think where we went wrong; to cause us to think and to understand that closing ourselves up and creating disconnected communities - with a separate education system and a sterile world of Torah - are racism in disguise," said Knafo. "The truth is that it's the same public. The religious public created this clip and is disgusted by it, like a person who eats bad food and vomits it right away. The clip was not made in a vacuum. It tried to reflect, in an exaggerated manner, what the national religious public thinks: that we love being with ourselves, lavishing in the wholesome image we try to project. More moral than the secular, more patriotic than the left, more cultured than the Mizrahi."
