Israeli youths end death camp trip with stripshow

JERUSALEM, Nov 18 (Reuters) - Israeli high school students ended a pilgrimage to former Nazi death camps in Poland by bringing strippers to their hotel rooms for a late-night show, the school's principal said on Thursday.

"There was a male stripper and a female stripper," Rachela Yoktan, principal of Ofek High School, attended by youngsters from kibbutzim (collective settlements) in the Galilee, told Israel Radio.

News of the stripshow evoked some soul-searching on morning radio programmes in Israel, home to about 300,000 survivors of the Nazi Holocaust in which six million Jews were killed.

"Where did we go wrong?" lamented an Israel Radio commentator.

"They found cards in the hotel listing all kinds of services that guests could order," Yoktan said, explaining how the youngsters arranged the stripshow. "Several of the students were drunk."

Yoktan said the incident took place earlier this month, behind the back of a teacher chaperoning the group of 70 students aged 17 to 18.

In what has become a rite of passage for Israeli youth, thousands of students travel to Poland each year to tour World War Two death camps. Many of the groups schedule a stopover in Prague, in the Czech Republic, to ease the emotional strain.

"Not everyone attended (the stripshow)," Yoktan said. "Those who did felt in retrospect that it was wrong and regret it."

Yoktan said the school would try to find "an educational response" to the students' actions.

"I don't think we can find a punishment that fits what they did,"she said. "To say that we failed, no. I think they are wonderful students ... good kids. They made a mistake and we will examine where we went wrong."

Education Minister Yossi Sarid was having none of it. He issued a terse statement saying his ministry would "instruct the school on the action it should take."