Zoom-bombers used a swastika, pornography, and anti-Semitic language to invade a Holocaust Remembrance Day call: 'It felt like our voice was taken from us'

• Zoom-bombers broadcast racist and anti-Semitic language, profanity, pornographic images, and a swastika drawing during a Zoom call that was supposed to acknowledge Holocaust Remembrance Day.
• "It felt like our voice was taken from us," one participant on the call, a meeting meant for Jewish students in Europe, told Insider.
• Incidents of racist and offensive Zoom-bombing have continued to spread as the coronavirus pandemic has forced the world to move online. A spokesperson for Zoom told Insider that the company condemns such behavior.
• Warning: this article contains graphic imagery.
• Visit Insider's homepage for more stories.

As the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor, Eleanor Carmeli always observes Holocaust Remembrance Day. This year, with the coronavirus outbreak forcing the world to shut down, Carmeli sought out a way to honor her grandmother on the holiday, which is called Yom HaShoa in Hebrew, online on Tuesday, April 21.

Carmeli, a 30-year-old New Yorker living in London while earning her master's degree from the London School of Economics, had been looking forward to a Zoom call for Jewish students in Europe. The call began as expected, with an interview with the creator of an Instagram storytelling project called Eva's Stories, which reimagines the life of a young Jewish girl in the Holocaust through the lens of social media. The moderator was based in Munich, Maya Kochavi from Eva's Stories was in New York, and 20 to 30 Jewish students from all over Europe came together remotely to think about the six million Jews who died at the hands of Nazis in World War II.

The Zoom-bombing began with a trickle and then happened all at once.

First, Carmeli heard a loud groan. Then, someone shouted, "I love Anne Frank." Suddenly, the meeting went from 20 to 30 participants to nearly one hundred people, Carmeli said. "Dozens of people infiltrated the call," Carmeli told Insider over the phone on Wednesday morning.

Before the organizer or others on the call had a chance to realize what was happening, Carmeli said her screen went white, as one of the Zoom-bombers began to share their screen. A swastika was slowly drawn, the symbol of Nazi Germany invading Carmeli's computer on the annual day she honors those lost in the Holocaust.

The chat box of the Zoom meeting filled with racial slurs and the screen showed anti-Semitic language and the claim that "Jews did 9/11." Pornographic images and denials of the Holocaust were broadcasted. Zoom-bombers shouted slurs and offensive comments directly into Carmeli's headphones.

"All of a sudden they're in your most intimate space, which is your home," Carmeli said of the experience. "It felt like our voice was taken from us."

Carmeli was not alone in her experience on Tuesday. Another event hosted by the Embassy of Israel in Berlin that featured testimony from a Holocaust survivor was also interrupted with pictures of Adolf Hitler and offensive language. Jeremy Issacharoff, Israel's ambassador to Germany, said on Twitter after the interruption that the effort to "dishonor the memory" of the Holocaust and its survivors "is beyond shame."

Incidents of racist and offensive Zoom-bombing have continued to spread as the coronavirus pandemic has forced the world to move online.

There have been dozens, if not hundreds, of both anti-Semitic and racist attacks in classrooms, religious ceremonies, school board meetings, and other gatherings worldwide.

The problem has been so widespread that the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) held a webinar on how to prevent Zoom-bombing on April 14. "Our sense of security and safety, both in the real world and online, are being tested," said Oren Segal, vice president of the ADL's Center on Extremism, on the call, according to J. Weekly. Zoom's chief product officer Oded Gal even spoke on the webinar, highlighting that the company has been taking action to further prevent this behavior.

Zoom usage went from 10 million daily meeting participants at the end of 2019 to over 200 million last month, according to a representative for the company.

"We have been deeply upset to hear about these types of incidents," a company spokesperson told Insider. "Zoom strongly condemns such behavior and recently updated several features to help our users more easily protect their meetings." Such measures include default password protection settings and virtual waiting rooms and the ability for administrators to lock meetings and kick out uninvited guests.

"We encourage users to report any incidents of this kind either to Zoom – so we can take appropriate action​ – or directly to law enforcement authorities," the spokesperson said.

It's likely that the Zoom-bombers on Carmeli's call found the event flyer on Facebook, where it was shared with a public meeting link. The event was organized by the Union of Jewish Students and the Jewish Agency for Israel. (Neither organization immediately returned Insider's request for comment on Wednesday morning.)

Despite the horror of what she experienced, Carmeli said she was reminded of her duty to uphold the memory of those lost in the Holocaust, as the next generation of Jews worldwide will have no living survivors to learn from. "It's just attacking and offending every memory of each person who was on that call, of each person who perished, of each person who survived. And it's stripping them of their honor. That feels really difficult in a time and in a generation where all we have to rely on is people's stories," she said.

But it also reminded her of the accountability needed worldwide to make sure that nothing like the Holocaust ever happens again. "'Never again' means you have to actively take a step to ensure that not just Jewish genocides, but all genocides don't happen again," Carmeli said. "I felt very charged to make sure that we're sticking to the 'never again.'"

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