Germany: 'The word Jew was not a common insult when I went to school...it is now.'

Via CNN:

Rachel always thought it was best to hide her religion from her high school students. The trouble started a few years ago when she let slip to a student that she was Jewish.

"I found swastikas scribbled in their textbooks, they drew penises around my name on the blackboard, and they'd yell like 'Hey, Jew' at me during class," said Rachel, a teacher in Berlin. "It became harder... to do my job."

Rachel, whose name has been changed because of safety concerns, went to her headmaster, and then to the police, but she said neither took her complaint seriously and would not intervene.

She said things got worse. The students saw Israel as a menace, an oppressor of the Palestinian people and viewed her as a stand-in for the Jewish state, she said. They took out their frustration by screaming anti-Semitic slurs at her.

Last year, she decided to switch schools for her own safety. She has not told her new students she's Jewish.

In a country still haunted by the Holocaust, anti-Semitic incidents in the classroom offer clear evidence that deep wounds haven't healed. Some Jewish teachers and students say they are caught between a surge of traditional right-wing anti-Semitism and threats from Muslim immigrants angry at Israel.

Unsure of how to deal with anti-Semitism in the classroom, Jewish teachers very often keep incidents to themselves to avoid tipping off their own religious identity, according to Marina Chernivsky, the head of the Berlin-based organization Kompetenz Zentrum für Pravention und Empowerment (or Competence Center for Prevention and Empowerment), which provides counseling to individual and institutions after anti-Semitic and discriminatory incidents.

She recently held a workshop to help Jewish teachers deal with anti-Semitism in their classrooms. Around 20 Jewish teachers attended the session; Chernivsky said it was the first time many of them opened up about the problem.

"It's not normal to be Jewish in Germany so anti-Semitism is not normal to talk about," Chernivsky said. "It's very taboo."

It took history and politics teacher Michal Schwartze years to reveal her religion to her students.

The Frankfurt based 42-year-old said she didn't feel comfortable teaching about the Holocaust, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or anti-Semitism in Europe without being transparent with her students.

"I don't say hey I am Jewish, but I make it clear that I am personally affected," said Schwartze.

A few years ago, Schwartze penned an article in her school's newspaper encouraging students to stop using the word "Jew" as a slur. She said she took a risk writing the piece, but it raised awareness around anti-Semitism at her school.

"Fortunately, I have colleagues who are sensitive and a headmaster who has an interest in preventing anti-Semitism," says Schwartze. She cautioned that Jewish teachers who don't have similar support need to "hide their identity."

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Germay: Teens fire antisemitic insults at local rabbi

Via Algemeiner:

A Chabad-Lubavitch emissary in Offenbach, Germany, was the victim of a verbal assault on his way to synagogue this past weekend by a group of teenagers.

“They shouted, ‘sh**ty Jew’ and ‘Free Palestine’ and other things at me,” Rabbi Menachem Mendel Gurevitch wrote in a post on Facebook. The incident took place on Friday afternoon when Gurevitch, 39, was on his way to pray. He said he does not hide his Jewish identity, despite increasingly frequent antisemitic attacks in Europe.

“Usually, I ignore things like this, but this time I couldn’t, so I decided to try and talk to them. But the more I talked, the more they shouted at me,” he wrote.

This was not the first time that Gurevitch, director of Chabad Lubavitch of Offenbach am Main, has come under attack. Five years ago he was assaulted by a group of teens who started screaming antisemitic slurs at him. After that incident, a group of local residents organized a meeting with the assailants and they apologized.

“Offenbach is a good city, but antisemitism is becoming normalized and standard. I get ‘compliments’ like these often,” he told the local news site Hessenschau.

“My children don’t want to walk with me if I’m wearing a kippah,” he added, saying that his children hide their own kippahs under hats when they are outside, “because they’re scared.”

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Germany: JFK School latest site of anti-Semitic bullying in Berlin

Via Handelsblatt Global:

Just days after a Berlin court sentenced a man for an anti-Semitic attack, Berlin’s prestigious John F. Kennedy School acknowledged that a student had been the victim of months of anti-Semitic bullying.

School officials are still unclear of the scope of the bullying, but a newspaper report said students had put swastika stickers on the Jewish ninth-grader’s backpack, made remarks about trains to Auschwitz and blew smoke in his face, saying it should remind him of the fate of his forefathers.

“There wasn’t enough effort in the beginning to rectify the situation,” Deidre Berger, director of the American Jewish Committee in Berlin, told Tagesspiegel, a sister publication of Handelsblatt Global. Ms. Berger had been in touch with the school administration for weeks and said the complaints were originally dismissed as juvenile pranks. She first contacted the school by letter on June 12 but has yet to receive a reply.

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Bulgaria: Anti-Semitic symbols at Bulgaria football match

Via European Jewish Press:

The World Jewish Congress has strongly condemned the “disturbing and provocative” photographs that emerged in Bulgaria showing two boys at the Bulgarian Cup football finals with neo-Nazi symbols scrawled across their chests.

The incident has caused an outcry after pictures circulated online of the two boys, who appeared to be under 10, making the Nazi salute, at the Bulgarian Cup final between Levski Sofia and Slavia PFC in Sofia last Wednesday night.

The Organization of the Jews in Bulgaria “Shalom” strongly condemned the incident. It has referred the matter to the National Co-ordinator against Anti-Semitism, Deputy Minister Georg Georgiev.

“It is unacceptable that young children should be encouraged to exhibit such behaviour,” Shalom said.

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Germany: Non-Jewish teen honored for standing up to neo-Nazis

Via Times of Israel:

A non-Jewish German teenager from Dresden has been honored by the Jewish community for standing up to neo-Nazis at her school.

The 15-year-old, known as Emilia S., received the Prize for Civic Courage against Right-wing Radicalism, Anti-Semitism and Racism on Tuesday from the Jewish community of Berlin and the Association for the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.

(...)

She told reporters she had been afraid to stand up to her classmate alone, but changed her mind after he started circulating anti-Semitic images via cellphone chats.

“The most horrible one was a picture of smoke with the caption ‘Jewish family photo.’ I reacted and said they should cut out the Nazi stuff,’” Emilia recalled.

Her classmates laughed at her, and then the person who had shared the images started sending texts about how Emilia “wanted to emigrate to Poland” and how she had “inhaled too many dead Jews.”

Emilia said she planned to share the prize money of 2000 euros, about $2,300, with a 14-year-old Jewish boy in Berlin whose family moved him to another public school earlier this year after classmates harassed him physically and verbally.

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France: 10-year-old Jewish girl assaulted by classmates

Via BNVCA (National Bureau for Vigilance Against Anti-Semitism):

A ten-year-old child was violently assaulted by classmates at a primary school in the 18th arrondissement of Paris on the grounds of her Jewishness.

According to a complaint filed with the police by the girl Ness C. and her mother, the 10-year-old girl was subjected to insults, beatings and punchings several times and for several consecutive days.

The girl was taken to hospital suffering from pain in her abdomen and ribs. She was signed off from school for ten days.

The BNVCA asked the police to make every effort to ascertain whether the child had been attacked on anti-Semitic grounds and if so for this fact to be taken into account in the course of the investigation.

The mother complained that the school had failed to protect her child and to sanction the young offenders.

The Paris Rectorate was contacted by the BNVCA and is investigating the matter.  The Rectorate has acceded to the request by the mother for the child to be transferred to another school.

UK: Young boys give Jews Nazi salute

Via Echo News:

A RESIDENT has been left horrified after witnessing a group of youngsters give Nazi salutes to a group of Jewish people on Canvey.

The community of Chasidic Jews have started moving to the island from Stamford Hill after being forced out of London by high rents.

They chose Canvey, due to the community spirit and the former Castle View School site which they have bought and will turn into a Jewish school.

Despite a generally warm welcome, there have been some unpleasant anti-Semitic incidents, including a group of youths on bikes performing a Hitler salute. 

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UK: Jewish 14-year-old allegedly asked by gang of four whether he is Jewish, then robbed

Via CAA:

Just before 10:30 this morning, a 14-year-old Jewish boy walking along the towpath of the River Lea in Hackney was approached by a gang of four teenagers of Asian or Middle Eastern appearance who asked him: “Are you Jewish?” When he replied in the affirmative, the teenagers allegedly grabbed him, searched his pockets and stole his wallet

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UK: Jewish chaplain’s daughter ‘punched and kicked’ in anti-Semitic attack

Via Jewish News:

A Jewish chaplain has praised his 16-year old daughter’s response after being punched and kicked in a racist attack in an Edgware park – and slammed the police for “failing to respond”.

Alex Goldberg, a barrister who is Jewish Chaplain at the University of Surrey and Chaplain to Surry Police, said the attack took place on Shabbat almost two weeks ago, and that one of the attackers said: “Hitler should have killed all you Jews.”

Writing on Facebook, Goldberg said his daughter Hannah – who was in Stoneyfields Park with two friends – had a basketball thrown at her head before being kicked in the chest and punched in the face by two boys, who then ran off.

He said the girls, who are Orthodox and easily recognisable for wearing long skirts on Shabbat, were then helped by a mother of two children who called the police, but that officers had not arrived two hours later, when the girls went home.

Taking to social media, Goldberg said he was posting the story “in the hope that the Met Police sort themselves out here and that we as community leaders start to realise that it is important to work on community cohesion”.

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UK: Family reportedly pelted by stones by youths yelling ‘Jews’

Via Jerusalem Post:

 A Jewish family was reportedly pelted with stones by a group of youths shouting “Jews” at the Kent seaside in England over the bank holiday weekend, according to Jewish neighborhood watch group Shomrim.

The parents and their five children, aged between eight and 15, were playing at Minster Beach on the Isle of Sheppey on Sunday afternoon when the incident occurred.

The family from London’s Stamford Hill area – home to Europe’s largest haredi (ultra-Orthodox) community – cut their vacation short out of fear for their safety, Shomrim said in a series of Twitter posts.

The volunteer group said it was providing support to the family and accused Kent Police of failing to dispatch officers to the scene at the time of the incident. Kent Police responded that during the victims’ phone call to the police, the informant and suspects left the scene and officers determined that there was no further risk.

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Germany: Jewish teachers afraid to reveal their religion to students

Via DW:

(...) The Deutschlandfunk report also featured Jewish teachers from Berlin and elsewhere in Germany saying that they were afraid to reveal their religion to their students. 

"There was a student who told me: 'If I saw a Jew, I'd immediately kill him,'" one teacher from northern Germany told the radio station on the condition of anonymity. "And he meant it." 

The abuse caused one teacher in Berlin to address an angry public letter to Chancellor Angela Merkel and other leaders complaining about anti-Semitism in Berlin's schools. Berlin authorities say they are aware of the problem and acknowledge that the word "Jew" is frequently used as an insult in some of the German capital's schools. 

There was a flurry of interest in the topic in 2015, when the German-Israel Youth Congress was held in Berlin, but the public attention quickly dissipated. Other incidents of anti-Semitism in Berlin schools were reported last year. According to the website report-antisemitism.de, members of the Jewish Forum for Democracy and against Anti-Semitism (JFDA) were called "child murderers" when they visited a school in the heavily Muslim district of Neukölln in May 2016. The JFDA said they had never before experienced such crass anti-Semitism among students. 

There are no official statistics on anti-Semitic incidents specifically in Berlin schools, although the Research and Information Office on Anti-Semitism in Berlin recorded 470 such incidents generally in Berlin last year. Experts say the problem of anti-Semitism in schools stems partly from the conflicts in the Middle East and young people's susceptibility to conspiracy theories. 

"The Middle East conflict is a big concern of these young people, but their knowledge of the issues is very one-sided," Islamism expert Ahmad Monsour told the "Tagesspiegel" in 2015. "It quickly turns into anti-Semitism. It's easy to say the Jews are to blame for everything."

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Germany: Muslim students protest Holocaust remembrance, school supports 'criticism'

Via Jerusalem Post:

Muslim students of Arab and Turkish origin protested participation in an International Holocaust Remembrance Day event in Germany, while their high school’s administration showed understanding for their criticism of Israel.

“Some Muslims students said they would not participate in the event,” said Florian Beer, a teacher at the school in the city of Gelsenkirchen in North Rhine-Westphalia state, Der Westen newspaper reported on Thursday.

The Holocaust remembrance event was part of a global commemoration in which participants take selfie photographs along with a sign saying “I Remember“ or “We Remember.“ A blackboard at the school was defaced with the sentence: “F*** Israel, free Palestine.” The school was not able to identify the perpetrator.

(...)

The Weiterbildungskolleg Emscher-Lippe school, where the protest unfolded, has 500 students, 40% of whom have a migrant background.

School director Günter Jahn told Der Westen it was good that there was student opposition to the remembrance event. “It is important that there is criticism. That is the basis for a discussion.” He added that in certain communities, criticism of Israel is demanded.

The school is located in the northern part of the Ruhr region and Gelsenkirchen’s population in 2015 was roughly 260,000.

Some of the students allowed themselves to be photographed with the remembrance signs but declined to permit the photographs to be displayed on the Internet. A number of students, according to Der Westen, asked, “Why always the Jews?” The students added there are, after all, other problems in world.

Beer said the school likes to be provocative because there are always events at the school that leave an “aftertaste of antisemitism.” He added that representatives from the World Jewish Congress have been invited to come speak at the school.

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UK: The Fear Driving Jews to Jewish Schools

Via Haaretz:

When my daughter was four, the age that compulsory education begins in the U.K., I didn’t enroll her at a primary (elementary) school in my leafy, London neighborhood. I opted for a state-funded Orthodox Jewish one, several postcodes away, instead.

I reasoned the long car journeys across town were an acceptable trade-off for the grounding Rebekah would receive in Jewish custom and practice, and in the Hebrew language: the Yiddishkeit that I, with my complicated Jewish upbringing, had missed out on.

On paper, an Orthodox establishment was an unlikely choice. In reality, it was full of liberals who’d never had a God-bothering moment in their lives. I felt I’d come home.  But after six years of driving for two or more hours five days a week I admitted defeat, and enrolled Rebekah in a local, mainstream primary school.

Anxious for her to settle in quickly, I was delighted when, during her first week, she was invited to a classmate’s home. When I picked her up I discovered the child’s very English, middle-class parents were also journalists, and as we exchanged chit-chat about our industry, my eyes roamed around their book-lined living room. And then I froze. Stuck to the edge of one of the groaning shelves was a sticker that read: Boycott Apartheid Israel.

A couple of months later I was having coffee with the mother of Rebekah’s new school friend, Ella. Conversation turned to a parent at the school who was active in hard left politics, and whose daughter, Sasha, was in our girls’ class. “I feel dreadful telling you this, Karen,” said the mother,” but some leaflets fell out of Sasha’s bag in the playground yesterday, and they said: Kill Jews. Ella picked them up really quickly so Rebekah wouldn’t see, but still.” It was November 2012, and several days into Operation Pillar of Defense. Sasha, I later learned, had been on a protest against the assault with her mum and must have picked up the radical Islamist leaflets there.

(...)

Anti-Semitism is a mutating virus, and during her time at secondary school my daughter has experienced pretty much all its variations. Religious: you killed Christ. Racial: how come you haven’t got a big nose? Economic: Jews are rich and owns loads of businesses. Political: Zionists are racists.

Generally, the black and white working-class kids spout the religious and racial anti-Semitism; Muslim and middle-class students peddle the political prejudice; and everyone appears to think Jews are loaded.

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Italy: Students at ten high schools list Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ among favorite books

Via The Algemeiner:

"La mia battaglia"

Students at ten Italian high schools included Nazi leader Adolf Hitler’s autobiography Mein Kampf in recently-compiled lists of their top ten favorite books, The Local reported on Thursday.

Italian Education Ministry official Alessandro Fusacchia was quoted as calling the students’ choice a “particularly nasty case.” According to Fusacchia, students had been asked to pick from books by Italian authors that were published after 2000.

“We are looking into it, but we are convinced that it was not a bad interpretation of the request, but rather a free choice,” he said.

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Belgium: Antisemitism makes pupils hide their Jewishness

From the CCOJB:

Serge Rozen, head of some Belgian Jewish organisations, the CCOJB, extended his greetings to the Jewish community on the occasion of Rosh Hashana,

Mr Rozen remarked that a few Jewish pupils had to leave state-funded schools because they were bullied or were the butt of anti-Semitic insults.  

He added that the few cases which received media attention are the visible tip of the iceberg.  Many other Jewish children, through fear and a hostile environment, resort to hiding their Jewishness.

UK: "It was the first time I’d seen anti-Semitism, kids chasing after you in a park and calling you a bloody Jew"

Via Times of Israel:

Being out of Israel — where, he says, he felt “protected” — and in Leeds, Charney says he felt “vulnerable. It was the first time I’d seen anti-Semitism, kids chasing after you in a park and calling you a bloody Jew. Israel gives you a sense of security, and especially in the army, there’s a feeling of collective strength. You can do, you can protect, you can defend. It’s a very different mentality.”

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UK: London gang tells schoolboy to remove skullcap or face violence

Via Campaign Against Antisemitism:

An 11-year-old Jewish boy has escaped shaken but unhurt after a gang of teenagers surrounded him on a London street and forced him to remove his kippah (Jewish skullcap). According to Shomrim, the Jewish neighbourhood watch patrol, the boy was approached by at least four black teenagers who told him that unless he removed the kippah, they would beat him. The boy refused to comply and instead managed to escape and run home.

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Sweden: Malmö launches campaign to tackle anti-Semitism

Via The Local:

A new campaign launched in southern Swedish city Malmö hopes to fight anti-Semitism by encouraging thousands of school students to talk about the issue.

The project, a combined effort between the Jewish Community of Malmö and the City of Malmö, will focus on creating dialogue about anti-Semitism by exploring the shared experiences between the city’s Jews and many of its young people.

“We are actually quite similar in our experiences. Many Jews here are children or grandchildren of refugees who fled war and came to Sweden,” Jewish Community of Malmö chairman Fredrik Sieradzki told The Local.

“That’s the great thing about this new education programme, it uses that shared experience and it makes it easier to talk.”

The project will use movies, exercises and discussion materials on the topics of anti-Semitism, racism, and seeking refuge to help encourage discussions, with 288 teachers receiving special training.

When the materials were tested among different school groups, the result was that adolescents with similar experiences started to get more involved in discussions.

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UK: Jewish cemetery vandalized in Belfast

Via Belfast Telegraph:

Thirteen Jewish graves have been damaged at Belfast City Cemetery in an attack branded "anti-community, anti-Belfast, anti social and anti Semitic".

It's thought a large crowd had gathered in the area at around 3pm on Friday with eight youths carrying out the attacks with hammers and blocks.

Headstones were knocked over and smashed in the attack. The concrete covers of some of the graves were also damaged.

Belfast Sinn Fein councillor Steven Corr described the attacks as "anti-community, anti-Belfast, anti-social and anti-Semitic".

He was one of the first on the scene and saw those responsible "stagger off".

"It was sickening," he said.

"They had actually tried -  and on several occasions had - smashed the slabs which covered the remains.

"Most of the graves were very old. One from 1897 and the most recent about the 1950s.

"What happened was just disgusting."

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Poland: Dad teaches his son an antisemitic song

Via CFCA:

Rumia - Polish father from Rumia (near Gdansk) made a video of his toddler-son singing antisemitic song of Wroclaw's music group OBLED ("Madness").

The music band is listed as an antisemitic group by ADL, known formerly as "Konkwista 88". That video, primarily posted on YouTube went through almost all Nationalists' web sites making waves and getting big approval of listeners.

The song's creation and posting it had been an answer for announced contest for a children song by local Nationalists' section for toddlers called "Jas" (means: "Little John").

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