An Israeli court has suspended the auction of a partial Nazi tattoo kit believed to be used on inmates at the Auschwitz death camp.
The judgment came on Wednesday following an outcry from Holocaust survivors who chastised the auctioneers in Gilo, a Jewish settlement in the West Bank, for trying to flog the kit.
Obtained from a private collector, the kit is comprised of eight fingernail-sized steel dies, each lined with pins to form numerals, which would have been pressed into prisoners' flesh with ink to brand their serial numbers according to auctioneer Meir Tzolman.
His website had deemed it 'the most shocking of Holocaust items', with a projected sale value of $30,000 to $40,000.
More than 1.1 million people, most of them Jews, were killed at Auschwitz, among a number of camps run by Nazi Germany on occupied Polish soil during World War Two. It was the only facility that tattooed inmates.
The dies from a tattoo kit, and a manual, are displayed at an Israeli auction house which says they were used on inmates at Auschwitz death camp
A worker at an Israeli auction house organises dies from a tattoo kit, which they say were used on inmates at Auschwitz death camp, in Gilo, a Jewish settlement in the Israeli-Occupied West Bank November 2, 2021
the kit is comprised of eight fingernail-sized steel dies, each lined with pins to form numerals, which would have been pressed into prisoners' flesh with ink to brand their serial numbers
Auschwitz, also known as Auschwitz-Birkenau, opened in 1940 in Poland and was the largest of the Nazi concentration and death camps
Bidding reached $3,400 by Wednesday, when Tel Aviv District Court granted a request by survivors to order the auction halted pending a Nov. 16 hearing on whether it should proceed.
Tzolman's website was amended to show the sale had been suspended.
Israel has no law against private sales of Holocaust relics. A court spokesman's statement did not specify the legal basis for Wednesday's injunction.
Yad Vashem, the world Holocaust remembrance centre in Jerusalem, said it should have possession of items like the auctioned dies.
'The trade of these items is morally unacceptable and only
