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(47,271 posts)
Sun Jun 23, 2019, 08:38 PM Jun 2019

Europe's Jews Are Resisting a Rising Tide of Anti-Semitism

(this title, from TIME magazine, is modified from the one on the print issue.

Still, starting in Sweden??

The note jammed onto a windshield in Sweden in March last year was designed to terrify. WE ARE WATCHING YOU, YOU JEWISH SWINE, read the message to a retired professor, written on paper with the logo of the Nordic Resistance Movement, a Swedish neo-Nazi organization. In the bucolic university town of Lund, with its cobblestone streets and medieval buildings, the threat seemed jarringly out of place. More notes followed. “I was really scared,” says the professor, a small woman of 70, who is too fearful about a further attack to reveal her name in print.

Finally in October, an attacker broke into the professor’s home before dawn and set it alight. By a stroke of luck, the professor was not there. But her living and dining rooms were reduced to ash. So too were the writings of her late mother, detailing her internment in the Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz. “For the first time in my life I have needed therapy,” she says, over tea in a sunlit café in Lund. “I have not known what to do with my life.”

(snip)

Unsurprisingly, many Jews in Europe feel under assault. In an E.U. poll of European Jews across the Continent, published in January, a full 89% of those surveyed said anti-Semitism had significantly increased over five years. After polling 16,395 Jews in 12 E.U. countries, in a separate survey, the E.U.’s Fundamental Rights Agency concluded that Europe’s Jews were subjected to “a sustained stream of abuse.” With the decade drawing to a close, 38% of those surveyed said they were thinking about emigrating “because they no longer feel safe as Jews,” says the E.U. report.

European officials were stunned at the findings, but perhaps they ought not to have been. A complex web of factors have combined to create this moment in time for one of Europe’s oldest communities. Anti-Semitism has found oxygen among white supremacists on the far right and Israel bashers on the far left. Millions of new immigrants are settling in Europe, many from Muslim countries deeply hostile to Israel and sometimes also Jews. Exacerbated by the Internet’s ability to spread hatred, anti-Jewish feeling is surging in way that experts fear could result in a conflagration, if governments and communities fail effectively to tackle its causes.

(snip)

Elsewhere in Malmo, Jewish communities have devised other tactics. Public hostility against Kesselman, Malmo’s Hasidic rabbi, inspired local psychologist Jehoshua Kaufman to organize a protest that was both a demonstration and a show of faith — a kippah walk, on which both Jewish and non-Jewish citizens wear the traditional skullcaps in public, in protest against anti-Semitism.

One evening in 2011, Kaufman says, he asked about 15 congregants in Malmo’s synagogue to join him in not removing their kippahs as they left the building. “The community said, ‘They will kill us in the streets,’” he recalls. “They said, ‘You need police protection.’ I said no police.” The walk proceeded peacefully, and Kaufman says the experience was liberating. “Within a few weeks there were 100 people walking,” he says. “Then suddenly it was 500 people, and politicians showed up to make speeches.” There are now regular kippah walks in Malmo, Stockholm and Berlin.

https://time.com/longform/anti-semitism-in-europe/

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