Local Jewish leaders react with uncommon pessimism.
Anti-Semitic incidents were already on the rise in Europe ahead of the 11-day standoff between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, which resulted in more than 230 Palestinians and 12 Israeli deaths. Semitic activities that tend to accompany tensions in the Middle East. It is known on the continent as “the import of the Israeli-Palestinian clash”.
This dynamic stood out as an escalation in 2014, but this time, some Jewish network leaders and anti-Semitism fighters have long been issuing unusually harsh warnings that war can simply be lost.
Amid dozens of incidents in Belgium in recent weeks, Joel Rubinfeld, president of the Belgian League Against Anti-Semitism, wrote that he doubted he could continue to live in the country with his wife and two children.
“I think I could. Now I doubt he can,” Rubinfeld, former director of the CCOJB, the umbrella organization for French-speaking Belgian Jews, wrote in an editorial Saturday in the weekly Le Vif.
Brigitte Wielheesen, a well-known journalist and counter-terrorism expert from the Netherlands, wrote thursday in an editorial on the news site Jonet that after years of fighting anti-Semitism, she had concluded that the activity was futile.
“The fight against this disease is desperate,” wrote Wielheesen, a former secretary of the Netherlands’ interprovincial rabbinate. “If the Jews are the canary of Europe in the coal mine,” he said, then “this bird is no longer alive. “
The great Dutch rabbi Binyomin Jacobs, who for years the local Jews emigrated to Israel, partly because of anti-Semitism, said at a convention in the city of Nijmegen that he and his wife would leave if it were not for their duties.
“It made us a captain tied to a sinking ship,” one listener described in a letter he sent to Jacobs after the conference, Jacobs wrote on his blog.
The Israeli-Palestinian outbreak came shortly after Jews in France expressed deep considerations about their long-term in the country following a final court ruling in the case of Sarah Halimi. The country’s highest court upheld rulings that the Muslim man who killed the Jewish doctor and educator by shouting about Allah and calling Halimi a demon too addicted to marijuana to be criminally guilty of his actions.
“I have your doubts and questions about the future, and I share them,” said a leader of France’s leading Orthodox organization at a rally in Paris last month.
Not all leaders are so deeply pessimistic.
In Britain, Jews are shaken by a wave of anti-Semitic incidents this month and “marked” by the recent proliferation of anti-Semitism within the Labour Party, said Jonathan Arkush, former president of the Council of British Jews.
“But I don’t think he’s going to jump out of there to think that our network is not viable as it was,” he said, and mentioned the defeats of the Labour Party after 2019, media surveillance over anti-Semitism and the police’s efforts to curb it.
Meanwhile, news of anti-Semitic incidents continued to arrive during the week.
In the incident in Germany on Thursday in Magdeburg, a town about 110 kilometres west of Berlin, a youth organization allegedly harassed a 22-year-old who was wearing a kipá and beat him, causing minor injuries, according to the MDR. news website. A passerby intervened and the men left the site. The passerby said they were Arabs.
Also in Gerguyy, in the northern city of Hamburg, three other people in a car gave an anti-Semitic hate speech against a Jewish cyclist while detained at a traffic light, the online TAH news page reported. New Year’ Eve, 200 miles west of Berlin, a guy dressed in a mask with a david star motif insulted in the street.
In Austria, a non-Jewish woguy called it a “child murderer” and harassed three men on the subway who harassed her two weeks ago because she was reading an e-book called “Jews in the Modern World,” she told orf. broadcaster on Friday. A boy pulled her hair, she said.
The woman said the police had begged her about the incident and that she was not anti-Semitic because she is not Jewish. The Home Office told the ORF that it was investigating the incident.
In the UK, two men faced a neonatal nurse in an elevator at their London hospital after noticing their Star of David. They asked the nurse, Hadasa Abrams, if she believed in “a loose Palestine. “She replied, “I’m Jewish,” prompting one of them to say, “I’m going to kill all your people,” Abrams wrote on Facebook.
In the Belgian city of Antwerp, a blogger described witnessing a guy shouting “Go, filthy Jew” to an Orthodox Jewish woguy who approached a park bench where the guy was sitting.
On 21 May, a guy attacked an exercise in Austria after asking two men, who witnesses said they looked like from the Middle East, to avoid making anti-Semitic comments and denying the Holocaust, a local newspaper reported.
In London on the same day, a Jew attacked in his car for flying an Israeli flag, following a series of incidents, coupled with a serious attack by an open-air rabbi on his synagogue in Chigwell, near London, on May 16.
On the same day, a convoy with 8 cars with Palestinian flags passed through London, with passengers shouting anti-Semitic obscenities on loudspeakers. One of the passengers shouted “fuck Jews, rape your daughters” as he walked through a heavily Jewish domain of London.
“Anti-Semitism in the UK, unfortunately, still peaks in the Middle East, but it’s worse than ever,” tweeted Luciana Berger, a former Jewish Labour lawmaker who now works in public relations.
The British Jewish Security Unit documented more than 250 anti-Semitic incidents in the 17 days after 9 May, an increase of 500% in the last 17 days. In May, this unit, CSE, recorded 325 incidents, more than any month since 1nine84, when the CST began documenting incidents. In July 2014, Israel’s Hardened Lead Operation in Gaza, the CSE recorded 317 cases.
Israel and Hamas reached a ceasefire agreement on 21 May, but new incidents continue to occur. On Thursday, one of the largest charities in the British Jewish community, Norwood, which is helping young people with learning disabilities, was hacked. Free Palestine will end apartheid “replaced the home page.
On Tuesday, Elise Fajgeles, a former Jewish member of Paris’ city council, the scene of some of the worst acts of violence at the peak of 2014, wrote an open letter to Muslims in Europe calling on her network to crack down on extremists who perpetuate hate crimes. . against the Jews.
(According to France’s National Anti-Semitism Monitoring Office, Muslims or persons of Muslim origin are guilty of all recent violent incidents in which the identity of the perpetrators has been established or presumed. extremists who account for half, depending on the workplace).
“I’m here to tell you what’s happening there,” Fajgeles wrote in his open letter, published in French in the Times of Israel. “I’m going to communicate what’s happening in ici. I’m here. “to tell you about me. I need to tell you I’m afraid. PJC