A lingerie photo shoot held inside the now-abandoned Great Synagogue of Constanța angered Jewish activists and leaders after provocative pictures from the set circulated online, JTA reported on Wednesday.
“Scandalous,” Maximillian Marco Katz, head of the Monitoring and Combating Anti-Semitism in Romania organization, wrote Tuesday on Facebook. “In any other country in Europe, such a building would have been long ago restored. Why not in Romania?”
The synagogue serviced the small Jewish community of Constanța into the 1990s, but was abandoned when the community dwindled in numbers.
The photographer behind the photo shoot, identified by the website Info Sud-Est as CvRshoots, removed the photos from online following backlash and told the news site that he obtained permission from some workers in the area to have the shoot at the synagogue.
The Jewish Community of Constanța, which owns the building and recently hired an asset-management company to renovate it, also criticized the shoot.
“We are outraged. Nobody gave them consent. They got it fraudulently,” Sorin Lucian Ionescu, president of the Jewish community in Constanța, told Info Sud-Est.
