Google ordered to remove Brazilian bar mitzvah boy’s viral video
Published March 17, 2016
RIO DE JANEIRO (JTA) — A Brazilian court in Sao Paulo state ordered Google Brasil to remove from the internet all links to a humorous video about Nissim Ourfali’s bar mitzvah, which went viral with over three million views years ago.
In 2012, the Ourfali parents put together the three-minute video of their son Nissim lip synching to a parody of a teen pop music hit in which he talks about his life and his joy about becoming a bar mitzvah. The video went viral and Nissim Ourfali had his upper-middle class private life exposed to the world. His parents were slammed for overexposing their child to the clear danger of kidnapping in their violent country.
“In a few minutes, it went viral. It was totally unexpected. We don’t YouTube our videos, the families do so,” said producer Noemy Lobel, who led the creation of the video, during an online interview with the Jovem Pan news service. “The funnier you look and the more foolish you are, the better, that’s what I tell my clients.”
The boy’s parents removed the original video, but copies are still circulating. They later sued to have it removed from the Google web protal YouTube.
Visibly very shy, Nissim appears in the three-minute video singing a Portuguese-language parody version of “What makes you beautiful,” by British boy band One Direction, gesticulating with his skinny arms and hands, and dancing. “I am Nissim Ourfali” and “This is my bar mitzvah” are two of the song lines. Behind flows a sequence of photo montages of him, his parents and siblings and photos of the family’s trips around the world.
The video has been mocked by many, while dozens of covers, memes and animated gifs also have been created and spread across the web. There is also a Tumblr where people can upload their own version of the scene when Nissim sings “The best part is when we go to the whale” — meaning the Whale Beach — and a surreal montage of the boy on top of a killer whale appears.
Months after the video was posted, a judge ordered some websites to remove it. In 2014, the sentence was dropped after determining it would be impossible to completely remove it completely from the internet. The judge reprimanded the boy’s parents for not posting the footage in a private mode.
The current removal sentence is a victory of the family. Today, some 7650 results are found in a random online search for the boy’s name and total references reach over 46,000 hits.
