A Russian food chain in Brooklyn stocked and sold dozens of packages of roasted sunflower seeds featuring a caricature of a greedy and sinister-looking Jew wearing a skullcap on the label, Ynet learned on Wednesday.

The Cyrillic letters on the left of the label read, “Shalom, from Israel ,” while the right side employs a slang phrase meaning “spit them out everywhere,” alluding to “dirty Jews".

The packages drew the ire of Brooklyn's Jewish community, prompting the food chain's owners, the Shnayder family, to pull the packages from the shelves in all four of Net Cost Market’s Brooklyn locations.

Net Cost Market describes itself as the “Costco of the ethnic Eastern European market,” and offers a wide variety of imports from all over Eastern Europe. The roasted sunflower seeds are produced in the Former Soviet Union by Kremlin Kitchen.





'Spit them out everywhere.' Sunflower seed bag

Amos Hermon, head of the Jewish Agency's Anti-Semitism Task Force said this was not the fist case in which anti-Jewish symbols were used by Russians. "What we see here is the use of the same designs that were used in Nazi Germany and Eastern Europe prior to and during World War Two," he said.

"The manufacturer made a conscious decision to try and invoke anti-Semitic feelings, thinking it would boost sales."

Hermon said the Jewish Agency was checking whether the packages were distributed at additional locations.

According to him, the US has seen a sharp increase in anti-Semitism due to the global economic crisis, adding that some of the images and slogans posted against Jews on the Internet have not been seen there in years. In most cases, he said, the websites claim that a "Jewish conspiracy" was behind the fiscal meltdown.