Pregnant social media star posts #babyintheoven hashtag from Shoah memorial
Image published by Instagram account @hellentablada on Thursday has drawn fierce criticism
A pregnant social media influencer with 135,000 followers has been criticised for apparently using the hashtag #babyintheoven in a post about Berlin’s Shoah memorial.
A photo published by the Instagram account @hellentablada on Thursday shows 38-year-old jewellery and fashion designer Elena Tablada leaning against a concrete slab in Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe during a trip to the German capital.
According to screenshots circulated on social media, the photo caption, which appears to have been amended, originally read: “BERLIN”, with three emojis and the hashtags #babyintheoven #memorial and #berlin.
But the hashtag #babyintheoven drew criticism from online users, due to the Nazi regime’s practice of cremating the remains of Holocaust victims in death camps.
The hashtag was later seemingly removed and the caption amended to include the hashtag #neverforget.
Joining a chorus of criticism, the journalist Simon Hunter, from the English edition of the Spanish daily newspaper El Pais, tweeted a screenshot of the post in a tweet on Friday and wrote: “There are no words…”
The memorial, which opened in 2005 to commemorate the six million Jews murdered during the Holocaust, features some 2,700 slabs of concrete arranged in a grid and designed by the architect Peter Eisenman.
The site also includes an information centre on the persecution and extermination of European Jewry, frequented by nearly half a million visitors each year.
The controversial practice of taking selfies at memorials to the Shoah has attracted criticism in recent years. In March of last year, officials at the Auschwitz Memorial urged online users to stop taking selfies at the site’s railroad tracks.
“When you come to @AuschwitzMuseum remember you are at the site where over 1 million people were killed. Respect their memory,” organisers at the memorial said in a tweet.
“There are better places to learn how to walk on a balance beam than the site which symbolises [sic] deportation of hundreds of thousands to their deaths,” the tweet said.
Elena Tablada has been approached for comment.
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