Update: On May 24, 2006, a Dutch court sentenced a 23-year-old student to 40 hours of community service for making the "Housewitz" video.  The student, who said he made the video as a joke, expressed remorse for his actions.

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New York, NY, August 10, 2005 … The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has urged the Dutch government to take swift action against a video on a Dutch Web site which degrades the Holocaust.

Billed as "Housewitz," the video, directed by a Dutch student and available on a Dutch satirical Web site, presents the Auschwitz concentration camp as the venue for a house music party. Against a background of pulsating house music, some of the most shocking and painful images of the Holocaust are denigrated and belittled. The announcer tells viewers, over a picture of emaciated prisoners standing behind barbed wire, that the dress code for the party is "skinny Jew."  Other images are used for crude sexual jokes.

In a letter to Piet Hein Donner, Dutch Minister of Justice, Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director and a Holocaust survivor, said that the video "directly insults the Jewish people and denigrates the memory of the six million Jews and others who perished at the hands of the Nazis."

Mr. Foxman added that, "at a time when anti-Semitism, including neo-Nazi extremism, is on the rise, a video like this shows how easy it is to use the Internet as a channel for hate. This video strengthens those who preach hatred of the Jewish people and who denigrate or even deny the Holocaust."

The Anti-Defamation League, founded in 1913, is the world's leading organization fighting anti-Semitism through programs and services that counteract hatred, prejudice and bigotry.