Yelp Disables Reviews For RI Restaurant That Posted Anne Frank Meme

TIVERTON, RI — Yelp has disabled people from leaving reviews of a Tiverton restaurant that posted an anti-Semitic meme of Anne Frank on its Facebook page.

Management at the Atlantic Sports Bar & Restaurant posted the meme that had a photo of Frank with text that read, "It's hotter than an oven out there...and I should know." The post has since been taken down, and restaurant management publicly apologized for the Frank meme.

Hours after the meme was posted, the Atlantic received hundreds of negative reviews on Yelp.

"I would give it a zero if possible," one Yelp reviewer wrote. "A racist, bigoted establishment does not deserve to be in business, much less take in a single penny of anyone's hard earned money. They are toxic to society."

But following the comments, Yelp suspended reviews of the restaurant until further notice.

"This business recently received increased public attention, resulting in an influx of people posting their views to this page, so we have temporarily disabled the ability to post here as we work to investigate the content," a spokesperson for Yelp said in a statement. "While racism has no place on Yelp, and we unequivocally reject racism or discrimination in any form, all reviews on Yelp must reflect an actual first-hand consumer experience (even if that means disabling the ability for users to express points of view we might agree with)."

Frank was 15 when Nazi Germany killed her in 1945 at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp during the Holocaust. She is one of the most well-known Jewish victims of the Holocaust, because of her journal, "The Diary of Anne Frank." The diary documents Frank's life from 1942 to 1944, hiding during the German occupation of the Netherlands in WWII.