iPhone’s French-Made ‘Jewish or Not Jewish’ Finally Gets the Boot From App Store

Apple’s French-made app, “Jew or Not Jew,” has been removed from the App Store according to the app’s creator, Jonathan Levy.

The fun application asked people to guess whether French celebrities were Jewish or not. The creator, however, argued that he wanted to show Jewish pride.

The app, currently, had been under pressure from the French Jewish community and several human rights groups for stigmatizing Jews. The groups argued that the app violated the French law preventing the collection of personal data such as a person’s religion or ethnicity without any consent from the individual.

“I did it out of good intentions. I am Jewish myself, Levy told French radio, Europe 1, on Tuesday. The goal was just to bring a feeling of pride to Jews when they see that such-and-such a businessman or celebrity is also Jewish.”

Going by the law, Levy’s actions could cost him five years in prison and about $412,000 in fines. SOS Racisme, a French anti-racist NGO, has announced that it would file an official complaint for “an illicit” database by the end of this week.

Currently, Apple’s App Store is also facing the music for agreeing to sell the application for about $1. SOS Rasicme has said that it would only pursue the store if it refused to remove the program from sale.

The current law was founded on the principle that Nazis used similar methods to round up Jews during World War II and send them to concentration camps.

French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, according to the French daily Le Figaro, was one of the Jews on the application. Creator Levy has argued that he found all his information on the internet and that the data was already public, according to The Jerusalem Post.