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Across Europe, Jewish Safety Fears Grow
In France, violent incidents against Jews run up against an overall trend of fewer deaths due to hate crimes.
Government and religious officials lead a silent march in memory of Mireille Knoll in Paris on March 28, 2018. (Alain Jocard/AFP/Getty Images)
By Nina Siegal, Contributor | April 26, 2018, at 11:47 a.m.
Across Europe, Jewish Safety Fears Grow
Late in March, Mireille Knoll, an 85-year-old Jewish grandmother and Holocaust survivor, was found dead – stabbed to death with her body partially burned – in her Paris apartment. Two men in their 20s were placed under formal investigation on charges of murder motivated by anti-Semitism. French interior minister Gérard Collomb told Parliament that one of the alleged killers told the other, "She's a Jew. She must have money."
French authorities are still investigating the circumstances of the case, but Jewish advocacy groups across the world have situated the murder in the broader context of rising anti-Semitism in France, and across Europe.
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For Dr. Moshe Kantor, president of the European Jewish Congress, the slaying is "a sad symbol of what we are returning to." In January, in a speech at the European Parliament, Kantor warned that Europe is no longer safe against anti-Semitism because the last generation of Holocaust survivors and witnesses is dwindling. Knoll's death, he said, is another sign.
"There have been far too many of these murders and attempted murders of Jews in France to call them sporadic," Kantor wrote in an email. "This murder should not just appall us, it should serve as a final wake-up call that more must be done not just to protect Jewish communities and institutions, but also all individuals at risk."
Lethal violence against Jewish people is certainly not an everyday occurrence, but the brutal murder of a woman who had already experienced the horrors of mass genocide has been particularly painful to the international Jewish community. It follows other shocking anti-Semitic incidents in France, such as the 2012 killing of three Jewish children and a teacher at a Jewish school in Toulouse by an Islamic fundamentalist, and the 2015 murder of four people at a Jewish supermarket, linked to the Charlie Hebdo killings.
More recently, a Syrian man turned himself in to German police last week after admitting to using a belt to beat an Israeli man wearing a yarmulke in Berlin. The incident sparked protests this week and – in a nation sensitive to its relations with its Jewish community – has drawn the condemnation of Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Knoll's death resonates deeply across France because the country is home to the largest population of Jews in Europe and to the fourth largest such population in the world by country, according to 2015 data from the independent Pew Research Center. It also is part of a broader trend of growing anti-Semitism and Islamophobia that a European Union report noted more than two years ago.
There is rising concern about the safety of Jewish people and communities in Europe, as the number of violent attacks aimed at Jews in many countries has risen in recent years. Jewish leaders are speculating on the reasons why this may be occurring now. Some, such as Kantor, argue that 73 years after the end of World War II, Europe is no longer inoculated against anti-Semitism. Others blame the rise of populist, nationalist political parties, while still others point to radicalized Muslims, who, according to recent data from the University of Oslo, are most often the perpetrators.
Knoll's murder follows another attack in April 2017, when Sarah Halimi, a 65-year old Orthodox Jewish physician and kindergarten teacher in Paris, was beaten in her apartment and then thrown out a window. Both women had lived alone and had previously complained of anti-Semitic threats, according to Noémie Halioua, a French journalist with the Jewish weekly newspaper Actualité Juive and the author of a new book on the Halimi case.
While racially motivated hate crimes have decreased in France overall, there has been an uptick in anti-Semitic violence in the past year, from 77 incidents in 2016 to 97 in 2017, according to a report released by the Kantor Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry at Tel Aviv University in early April. The authors of the study cautioned that the information could not be verified by their criteria.
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The report also found that physical violence against Jewish people around the world dropped by 9 percent from 2016 to 2017, but anti-Semitic sentiment, hate-speech, threats and cyberattacks have become mainstream throughout Europe, they asserted, leading to a "corrosion of Jewish life."
Kantor says anti-Semitic violence has become "an almost daily occurrence in parts of Europe and apparently, Jews no longer feel that they can rely on the preventive actions of the law enforcement authorities to protect them even in their own homes."
The report concludes that the rise of anti-Semitism can be attributed to "the constant rise of the extreme right, a heated anti-Zionist discourse in the left, accompanied by harsh anti-Semitic expressions, and radical Islamism."
The Anti-Defamation League, an American Jewish nongovernmental organization, counts Knoll's death as the 11th anti-Semitic murder in France in the past 12 years. The group estimates that assaults on Jews that take place twice a week on average in France, creating a sense of insecurity for the entire Jewish community.
Sharon Nazarian, its senior vice president of International Affairs, has spent the past several months traveling to European capitals such as Paris, Berlin, Stockholm, Brussels, Budapest and Rome, speaking with Jewish community leaders and government officials.
"What I'm hearing from them is a real nervousness, a feeling insecurity, a lack of safety, both physically and also for their Jewish way of life," said Nazarian in a telephone interview. "It's really unprecedented going back to World War II. A lot of warning bells are going off and red flags are going up and we're very, very concerned."
She says "a loss of a sense of shame that did exist for decades after the war" about anti-Semitic attitudes has contributed to the shift, along with the rise of nativist right-wing politicians, anti-Zionist left wing activists, and scapegoating of Jews for other global problems.
Violent incidents, the Kantor Center report finds, have decreased because of better security and intelligence in protecting Jewish communities. But the report stresses that "it is overshadowed by the many verbal and visual expressions, some on the verge of violence, such as direct threats, harassments, insults, calls to attack Jews and even kill them en masse."
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Alvin Rosenfeld, director of the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism at Indiana University and an author of many books on the Holocaust and the perspectives of it, argues that anti-Semitism has never truly left Europe.
"The view that knowledge of the Holocaust would somehow be prophylactic, and it would guard against the return of anti-Semitism, seems now to be naive, and I admit that I myself subscribed to that view," he says. "It just isn't the case that Holocaust memory guards against the repeat of Jew hatred."
He agrees that the rise of anti-Semitic sentiment stems from a multiplicity of forces. "We're living at a time in which neo-nationalism, neo-nativism, populism, autocracy and theocratic extremisms are all coming to the fore, in some cases with a great rush," he said. "Anti-Semitism, together with hatred against other types of people, flourishes in such a climate."
Emile Schrijver, general director of the Jewish Cultural Quarter in Amsterdam, says anti-Semitism is not as bad in the Netherlands as it is in other countries, such as France. Yet, he adds, "there are very real threats and we have occasional incidents that are clearly of an anti-Semitic nature here," he said. 'This is different than the past. It happens more often. But in Holland, at least, I don't see a reason to panic."
He added, "anti-Semitism is definitely back in our streets, and there's no denying it,"
He adds: "And we should never make it more harmless than it is. The answer for me is don't go overboard, don't overreact. The way to turn it around it to talk about it openly and give it the right name."
Tags: Judaism, Europe, France, violence, Holocaust, death, religion, world news
Nina Siegal is an author and journalist who is a regular contributor to The New York Times and is based in Amsterdam, where she has lived since 2006. She can b... full bio »
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