“In 10 years, the risk of no Jewish life in Europe”
This is the alarm raised by Rabbi Menachem Margolin, director general of the European Jewish Association, at the international meeting in Krakow
“Europe has failed completely in the fight against anti-Semitism. On too many European streets we cannot walk around dressed in our clothes. There are more and more Jews who believe that in ten years there will be no more Jewish life in Europe.”
These are the words with which Rabbi Menachem Margolin, director general of the European Jewish Association, the umbrella organization that brings together the Jewish communities of Europe, opened the international conference on anti-Semitism held in Krakow on November 7, which was attended by twenty speakers from different countries.
Harsh words that express the growing feeling of insecurity and intimidation widespread among many European Jews. According to a survey contained in the first political-strategic plan of the European Commission against anti-Semitism, published in October 2021, ninety percent of Jews in the Old Continent consider anti-Semitism as a real and growing threat.
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Thirty-eight percent of Jews in the EU do not rule out emigrating….
Twenty-eight percent have directly experienced anti-Semitic attacks or harassment, and 34 percent avoid visiting Jewish places or events for security reasons. Thirty-eight percent of European Jews consider emigrating from the country in which they live because they do not feel safe.
Feelings of fear and unease vary by geographic area and social context as well as the different personal experiences of respondents.
However, the intelligence and police services of European countries almost all agree in identifying three main sources from which anti-Semitism grows: the extreme right (with significant differences from country to country), the extreme left and radical Islamism.
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In addition to these, there is also the newborn no-vax environment, hostile to COVID 19 restrictions, within which conspiracy theories flourish that lead to identifying the Jew as the responsible party.
This trend is especially widespread in the German-speaking area. According to the Federal Agency for the Protection of the Constitution, i.e. the internal secret service of Germany, the no-vax movement would be conveying within society a relativization and trivialization of the crimes suffered by Jews during Nazism.
Some no-vax protesters in fact compare the lockdown to concentration camps and unvaccinated people to Jews during Hitler’s period.
Heute wurde als Zeichen der Solidarität mit #Israel die israelische Flagge am Dach des Bundeskanzleramtes gehisst. Die terroristischen Angriffe auf Israel sind auf das Schärfste zu verurteilen! Gemeinsam stehen wir an der Seite Israels. pic.twitter.com/FR42K3iA4z
— Sebastian Kurz (@sebastiankurz) May 14, 2021
It is also as a result of this trend that, according to the vice-president of the European Commission, Margaritis Schinas, Europe is witnessing a “growing and worrying trend of anti-Semitic attacks and sentiments” that requires a shared EU strategy to combat them.
However, this is a difficult project to carry out because it clashes with the different interpretations of the phenomenon by the various countries, often reflecting their different sensitivities, histories and political cultures. For example, there is no single shared method for classifying Islamist anti-Semitic attacks.
While the police forces of some countries, such as Italy, classify attacks taking into account the origins and religious background of the aggressor, in others this is not done.
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In Germany, for example, the police forces and the press have for years avoided specifying the religion and origin of the perpetrators of attacks (not only anti-Semitic) in order to avoid exploitation.
This tendency is now progressively changing following the great public and political controversy triggered by some striking episodes of violence in recent years.
These discrepancies in classifications and political cultures mean that, to date, there is no single European database that collects data on anti-Semitic attacks following a single method. Instead, there are data collections of individual national states that apply different assessment tools.
What if Flanders fires 1050+ Rockets into Wallonia?#IsraelUnderFire pic.twitter.com/hmRMHOEbKp
— EJA (@EJAssociation) May 12, 2021
According to Statista, the independent German company that deals with surveys and statistics by collecting institutional data, 189 anti-Semitic attacks were recorded in 2020 in Europe (including non-EU). In first place is Germany with 59 cases, followed by the United Kingdom (46), Ukraine (22) and France (12). Italy registered eight cases.
However, a new relevant data emerges. That is the growth of anti-Semitic aggressions and behaviors in Western Europe, where in the last decades anti-Semitism was classified with rather low rates.
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Greece, Poland and Hungary have “very high mistrust rates”
A survey published in October by IPSOS and the Hungarian Europe Action and Protection League shows that Poland, Hungary and Greece are the European countries with the highest rates of social distrust of Jews. However, incidents of anti-Semitic violence in these countries are rare.
In contrast, concern is growing in the West, for example in France. “Jews are leaving Europe,” says Joel Mergui, president of one of France’s largest Jewish organizations.
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This phenomenon mainly affects young people who emigrate to Israel and the United States because they no longer feel safe in Europe.
In France, he adds, there are areas that are “no-go zones” for Jews and where even the police struggle to enter, referring to some urban neighborhoods in large cities densely populated by Muslim people that in recent years have been abandoned by several Jewish families for security reasons.
“While European politics and institutions devote significant resources and spare no effort in combating anti-Semitism the situation in Europe is not improving. On the contrary, it is getting worse.”
Everyone seems to agree on this. On how to deal with the problem, however, there are extremely different opinions.
(this in-depth article belongs to a special report realized by journalist Luca Steinmann for the Italian newspaper “La Verità”)
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