For Immediate Release:
October 9, 2003

Contact:
Matt Prescott 757-622-7382   

New York — Stephen R. Dujack, grandson of Yiddish writer and Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer, is returning to his grandfather’s home city with PETA’s controversial "Holocaust on Your Plate" exhibit. The display, which consists of eight 60-square-foot panels, each showing photos of factory-farm and slaughterhouse scenes side by side with photos from Nazi death camps, graphically depicts the point that Singer made when he wrote, "In relation to [animals], all people are Nazis." Singer made New York his home after fleeing Europe during the rise of anti-Semitism in the 1930s.

Date: Tuesday, October 14
Time: 12 noon-2 p.m.
Place: Duffy Square on Broadway, between 46th and 47th streets

PETA wants to stimulate contemplation of how the victimization of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and others characterized as "life unworthy of life" during the Holocaust parallels the way that modern society abuses and justifies the slaughter of animals. Just as the Nazis tried to "dehumanize" Jews by forcing them to live in filthy, crowded conditions, tearing children away from their mothers, and killing them in assembly-line fashion, animals on today’s factory farms are stripped of all that is enjoyable and natural to them and treated as nothing more than meat-, egg-, and milk-producing "machines." Hens are crammed on top of each other in small wire cages that do not afford them enough room even to lie down and have their beaks burned off with a hot blade to keep them from pecking each other for space. Pigs are kept in extremely narrow, barren, concrete-floored stalls and are castrated and have their tails cut off without painkillers. Calves raised for veal are torn from their mothers within hours of birth, causing acute distress to both mother and calf, and chained inside tiny, dark stalls, where their joints swell from trying to balance on slippery, waste-covered slats.

"The very same mindset that made the Holocaust possible—that we can do anything we want to those we decide are ‘different’ or ‘inferior’—is what allows us to commit atrocities against animals every single day," says PETA Campaign Coordinator Matt Prescott, members of whose family were murdered by the Nazis. "We are asking people to allow understanding into their hearts and compassion onto their tables by embracing a nonviolent, vegan diet that respects other forms of life."

For more information about PETA’s "Holocaust on Your Plate" project and to view the photo panels, please visit MassKilling.com.