(JTA) — A Florida woman who says she is Jewish has angered neighbors and received death threats over a holiday display in her yard that evokes Auschwitz.
The display, erected last week ahead of Halloween, is full of skeletons, some saluting Hitler and others with concentration camp numbers on their arms and yellow Stars of David on their chests. Behind the skeletons is a sign reading,”Arbeit Macht Frei,” or Work Sets You Free, the statement found on the entrance to the Auschwitz Nazi camp.
Susan Lamerton, who owns the home in New Port Richey, near the west coast of Florida, told WFLA News Channel 8 in Tampa that she is Jewish and she put up the display after fighting with the homeowners association over landscaping. But she told the Huffington Post that the display was in response to harassment from the association over a sign with a Star of David that she had put in her yard.
“It sickens me that we can have this, you know, with what happened in Pittsburgh,” neighbor Bonnie Katz told WFLA.
Lamerton told WFLA that she has received death threats over the display, but that she refuses to remove it. “I have freedom of speech, they have freedom of speech,” she said of her neighbors’ reaction to the display.
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