The Jewish Chronicle newspaper has criticised the film version of Irish writer John Boyne’s best-selling Holocaust book, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas.

The Israeli newspaper has panned the credibility of elements of the storyline in Boyne’s book and has described the Disney movie as ‘‘not particularly good’’ and lacking historical accuracy. Boyne’s literary agent has rejected the claims.

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas was directed by Mark Herman and produced by David Heyman, who produced the Harry Potter film series. The story is told from the perspective of the eight-year-old son of a Nazi commandant who befriends a Jewish boy held captive in a concentration camp during World War II.

The film opened to rave reviews in Ireland and Britain in the past ten days, while Boyne’s book - which has sold over three million copies since it was first published in 2005 - is currently number one in both markets.

The Jewish Chronicle review -which was written by the newspaper’s film critic, Gerald Aaron - is the second major criticism of Boyne’s original storyline to be carried in the Jewish newspaper.

It also carried a heavily critical review of Boyne’s book, by Robert Eaglestone, professor of contemporary literature at Royal Holloway, University of London, last December.

Eaglestone described Boyne’s ‘‘fable’’ as dangerously ill-informed and said it had wrongly made Auschwitz ‘‘as unreal as Camelot or Hogwarts School’’, while he accused the author of failing to appropriately research conditions at the camp.

Aaron described the ‘work’ camp depicted in the Disney film as ‘‘frankly ludicrous’’ and attacked the historical inaccuracies in the film, which depicts a concentration camp where there are no sentry towers overlooking where the boys meet and communicate from either side of the camp fence.

Simon Trewin, Boyne’s literary agent, defended the film this weekend and said that both he and the author were ‘‘absolutely thrilled’’ with what Mark Herman had brought to the film of the story.

‘‘Everyone is obviously entitled to have a critical opinion and this reviewer may be coming from a certain perspective, but I have seen this film six times and on every occasion it has been greeted with silence and people have left the cinema thinking deeply about the horror of the Holocaust,” Trewin told The Sunday Business Post.

The book won the People’s Choice Book of the Year at the 2007 Irish Book Awards and the Bisto Children’s Book of the Year last year, and is also a New York Times bestseller.