North Macedonia: Country's first Jewish lawmaker broke taboos, hit by antisemitism

 
Via Jerusalem Post:

Politics was supposed to be a very brief interlude in Rashela Mizrahi’s career as a scientist.

...

But what might have ended as the axing of a novice politician snowballed into the country’s first-ever wave of antisemitic rhetoric — with Mizrahi as its target.

Branko Trickovski, a well-known journalist and a supporter of the left-wing SDSM party, ridiculed Mizrahi on Facebook, describing her as a zealot for Macedonian and Jewish nationalism, who gets her strength from “eating hummus made of dead Jews.”

Mersiha Smailovic, a former official from the ministry that Mizrahi had headed, on Facebook wrote that Mizrahi was planning to place an Israeli flag at her office. Another SDSM activist called her a “Jew who worked for the Nazi occupation in World War Two.”

It triggered “a stream of hundreds of antisemitic messages. Death threats. Even against my daughter,” Mizrahi said of her two-year-old, her younger child she had with her husband, a 43-year-old welder who comes from a Christian Eastern Orthodox family.

“I’m still afraid. Not so much for me but for my daughter. I never thought this could happen in this country, where antisemitism never used to be a part of life,” Mizrahi said. “It has changed how I see my country.”

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Macedonia: Jewish lawmaker removed amid hostile anti-Semitic environment

Via JTA:

A Jewish lawmaker from Macedonia was removed as Labor and Welfare minister amid a hostile anti-Semitic environment present since she assumed office in early January.

The ruling party, the left-leaning Social Democratic Union of Macedonia, said Rasela Mizrahi was fired for not calling the country by its new name, North Macedonia, instead using the Republic of Macedonia.

Mizrahi, a member of the center-right VMRO-DPMNE party, was voted out of office on Saturday in a 62-26 vote. […]

“I am a proud Jewish woman from Macedonia,” Mizrahi said during the debate last week to remove her from office, the English-language Macdedonian news website Republika reported. The report said that Mizrahi faced “an unending torrent of anti-Semitic abuse from the left during her term in office.”

“Even before I walked into my office, as the first Jewish person in the history of Macedonia to be appointed to the government, I was the target of reckless anti-Semitic attacks. Instead of criticizing my work, I was attacked for my religion and nationality and labeled with a yellow star,” Mizrahi also said. Most of her family, prominent in Macedonia for centuries, were killed in the Holocaust.

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Macedonia adopts definition of antisemitism that mentions Israel hatred

Via Jerusalem Post:

The Balkan nation of Macedonia joined the United Kingdom, Romania and Bulgaria in adopting a definition of anti-Semitism that includes the demonization of Israel.

Macedonia, where the 75th anniversary of the deportation of the country’s Jews during the Holocaust is being commemorated this week, adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition last week, the World Jewish Congress said on its website.

Next month, the country will see the opening of the Holocaust Memorial Center for the Jews of Macedonia. Designed by Berenbaum Jacobs Associates, the new museum tells the story of the Macedonian Jewry beginning two millennia ago to the growth of the community as a haven from the Spanish Inquisition all the way to post-Holocaust Jewish Macedonia.

Nearly all of Macedonia’s more than 10,000 Jews were murdered in Treblinka, a former German death camp in occupied Poland, after their deportation by Bulgarian forces that had ruled the country with the approval of Nazi Germany.

Over the past two years, several European countries, as well as the European Parliament, adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism. The alliance adopted it in 2016 after the European Union’s body for fighting antisemitism removed from its website its working definition of antisemitism, which also included examples of some hateful speech on Israel.

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Kosovo arrests 19 in Islamic State plot to attack Israel soccer match

From The Times of Israel:

Kosovo police on Wednesday said they had arrested 19 people they suspected of being involved in an Islamic State plot to carry out terror attacks in Kosovo and neighboring Albania, including an assault during a football match between Albania and Israel this past weekend.

Police said the arrests were made over the past 10 days and that the suspects had planned “synchronized terror attacks,” without going into further detail.

“They were planning to commit terrorist attacks in Kosovo and also [an attack] against [the] Israeli football team and their fans during the Albania-Israel match,” Kosovo police said in a statement on Wednesday, adding that weapons, explosives, ammunition and a drone were seized during the sweep.

The police said the suspects were communicating and receiving orders from an Islamic State member, Lavdrim Muhaxheri, the self-declared “commander of Albanians in Syria and Iraq.”

Last week, a Kosovo court ordered seven of the suspects detained for a month while the investigation continued. The seven belonged to one network that notably planned to attack a stadium in the northern Albanian town of Shkodra during the country’s 2018 World Cup qualifier against Israel last Saturday, according to media reports.

Police said at the time that they were plotting “terrorist attacks” with their counterparts from Albania and Macedonia against the same targets in the two countries.

According to local media reports, the network in Kosovo consists of around 30 members and is a branch of a wider group in Albania and Macedonia, of which some remained at large. 

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Balkan Jewish conference discusses threat of anti-Zionism

Via Haaretz:

Hundreds of Jews from the Balkan states met recently in Montenegro for a first conference of its kind.

Most said they do not suffer from antisemitism but there were some Jews who disagreed.  One presented a 4th grade schoolbook from the Republika Srpska (Serbian repbulic in Bosnia) which says that the "Jews are a shitty nation and violated the Ten Commandments".  A representative from Macedonia asked "Are we brave enough to deal with the antisemitism, or it's better to stay silent and thereby show our loyalty to our countries?"

All representatives were concerned about the new antisemitism (ie, anti-Zionism), and it was extensively discussed at the conference.