A student minority officer at a British university told a Jewish student to “be like Israel and cease to exist.”
Omar Chowdhury, the Black and Ethnic Minorities officer at Bristol University, in southwest England, also told Izzy Posen to “fuck off” and that “your comments are like Israeli settlements: always popping up where they are not wanted.”
Chowdhury ran for his student union position on a platform of “zero tolerance for racism,” the London-based Jewish Chronicle reported.
Several Estonian news portals have reported that Rabbi Shmuel Kot, head of the Estonian Jewish Congregation, was verbally attacked on his way to the Tallinn Synagogue on Saturday. According to a friend of Rabbi Kot, who wrote about the incident on social media, an Estonian-speaking man shouted antisemitic slurs at the rabbi and his family. The police are investigating the incident.read more
The reason why Rabbi Kot had not reported the incident right away is that his belief forbids the use of a telephone on shabbat. The incident has since been reported to the police, who are looking into the matter.
A French TV channel said on Wednesday it had been forced to cut short a live Facebook broadcast from a desecrated Jewish cemetery in eastern France because of an onslaught of anti-Semitic commentary.
Separately, two swastikas and anti-Semitic slogans were found painted in red on a monument at a different cemetery near Lyon.
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France 3 television said it went live from the first cemetery in the village of Quatzenheim on Tuesday as President Emmanuel Macron was visiting to pay his respects after more than 90 graves were vandalised with swastikas and anti-Semitic abuse.
But as it broadcast footage online to its more than 1.3 million Facebook followers, the feed was inundated with anti-Semitic commentary and abuse.
"We are talking about explicit death threats, comments that were openly anti-Semitic and racist, including "Heil Hitler", "dirty Jew" or "dirty Jews", comments that were addressed at Emmanuel Macron and representatives of the Jewish community," the channel said in a statement explaining its decision.
"Within minutes, the number of vile and illegal comments had gone well beyond our capacity to moderate them," it explained, adding that it would have taken 10 or 20 staff to handle the onslaught. "We refuse to traffic in hatred."
French Jewish philosopher Alain Finkielkraut was the target of an anti-Semitic attack Saturday night, French media outlets reported.
The philosopher, whose writing focuses on the ideas of tradition and identitary violence (including Jewish identity and anti-Semitism), was assaulted by Yellow Vest protesters who have taken to France's streets in recent months to demonstrate the country's rising fuel prices.
In videos that documented the incident, protesters can be heard yelling: "Dirty Jew" and "you're a hater, you're going to die, you're going to hell," while others called on the thinker to "go home" and "return to Tel Aviv."
In a different clip demonstrators can be heard screaming anti-Semitic profanities such as "dirty Zionist shit."
An Israeli journalist was recently attacked in Berlin while trying to film a report, with video capturing a group of men harassing her and then apparently attacking her with a firecracker.
Antonia Yamin claimed the attack occurred because she spoke Hebrew, with several men throwing a firecracker at her and at her cameraman, while trying to film a report.
A video of the incident was published Sunday on Twitter by Yamin, Europe correspondent for Israel’s public broadcaster Kan.
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German daily Bild reported that the assailants were immigrants.
Yamin later tweeted that she had been asked by police to give a statement but shied from labeling the attack as anti-Semitic.
Speaking to Bild, Yamin suggested she was targeted because she was speaking Hebrew and had Hebrew writing on her microphone, although she said she did not know definitively if that was the reason for the attack.
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.read more
"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."
When Carinne Sjoberg dissolved the Jewish Community of Umea in northern Sweden, she knew it would send shockwaves far beyond the small congregation that she had spent decades building.read more
The move in May owed to intimidation by neo-Nazis, making it the first time in decades that a Jewish organization in Western Europe acknowledged that it felt compelled to close shop over safety concerns.
Neo-Nazis from the Nordic Resistance Movement, beginning in 2016, pasted stickers with fascist imagery on Umea’s Jewish community center, “making the place look like after Kristallnacht,” Sjoberg said. The closure followed surveillance activity on the center by the neo-Nazis, who published details about individual visitors.
“I didn’t take it lightly,” Sjoberg, a 56-year-old Jewish mother of two, told JTA about the decision to close. “I hate giving neo-Nazis this victory. But I can’t bear the responsibility for people’s lives, not under such threats,” she said of her city’s Jewish community of 70 people.
The closure caused a national uproar. Amid intense media coverage in Sweden of the affair, Prime Minister Stefan Löfven mentioned it in a speech denouncing anti-democracy forces in his country.
But the indignation did little to change the fact that in Sweden, Muslim extremism and the far right are part of a broader set of challenges to Jewish communal life. So while the Jewish community of Stockholm may be growing, the problems are nonetheless causing some Swedish Jews to fear for their future as a minority here.
“We have a vibrant community in Stockholm but even here we face multiple threats, from Muslim extremism to far-right violence,” said Aron Verstandig, president of the Council of Swedish Jewish Communities — an umbrella group with approximately 6,000 members out of Sweden’s estimated 20,000 Jews.
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.
The son of a chief rabbi of the Netherlands and his family were accosted on the street by two young men who shouted at them “f*** all Jews” at them.
Rabbi Yanki Jacobs, the son of Binyomin Jacobs, made a complaint to police on Sunday about the incident from the previous evening, the AD news website reported.
On a street corner in a heavily Jewish area in southern Amsterdam, “two young men called out at the family ‘Cancer Jews’ and ‘f*** all Jews’ at our direction. They repeatedly drove in our direction in an intimidating manner,” Yanki Jacobs was quoted as saying.
On Twitter, he listed the license plate number of the vehicle in which the two were riding with a request to help identify them. Jacobs said the men appeared to be of Middle Eastern descent.
“I have had enough,” he told AD, adding that previously he had been cursed on the street. “I’ve grown accustomed to thinking about it as normal, but now thought that we as a Jewish community must no longer agree for this to happen to us.
“If I do nothing, who will? I walk around my neighborhood, a 10th-generation Amsterdam Jew, and I will not be driven out of this city.”
In April, the brother of the museum’s director wrote a heartfelt message on Facebook decrying the “50 days of incessant hatred” directed at his brother, Piotr CywiÅ„ski.
"For 12 long years he’s worked in one of the most terrible places in the world, in an office with a view of gallows and a crematorium," CywiÅ„ski wrote. "Dozens of articles on dodgy websites, hundreds of Twitter accounts, thousands of similar tweets, profanities, memes, threats, slanders, denunciations. It’s enough to make you sick."
PaweÅ‚ Sawicki, who runs the museum’s social media operation, told the Guardian, "The collateral damage of the dispute is that Auschwitz became a target. We’ve had people saying they were not allowed to have a Polish flag here, or saying that the memory of Poles is not represented here, that the museum is anti-Polish – all of this is untrue, and we had to respond."
The museum, however, continues with a stiff stance, as it continues to regularly interject in Twitter discussions and by publishing a long list of false claims that have been made about the museum, ranging from the issue of Polish flags to the accusation that former Polish prisoners being not invited to a ceremony in January to commemorate the camp’s liberation.
The hate campaign initiated by the Polish nationalists has raised concerns over the pressure exerted on the official guides at the site in southern Poland.
The Guardian reported that at least two tourist guides suffered abuse, in one episode a foreign guide was attacked while in another the supporters of a convicted antisemite filmed themselves repeatedly bullying their guide during a visit to the camp in April.
In February, the official responsible for schools in the region in which Auschwitz is located argued that only Poles should be allowed to work as guides at the site. And they should be licensed by Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance, a state body widely seen as a tool used by the government to impose its preferred historical narratives.
"Foreign, and not Polish narratives reign at Auschwitz. Time for it to stop," wrote Barbara Nowak, who until last year served as a local councilor for Law and Justice.
A 24-year-old refugee, believed to be Muslim, was briefly detained by Belgian police for anti-Semitic hate crimes, including the destruction of at least 20 mezuzahs in Antwerp, local Jews said.
In recent weeks, the same man was filmed in Antwerp destroying at least 20 mezuzahs, religious objects containing a parchment with biblical text inked on it that Jews affix to their door frames, and vandalizing the entrance doors of several Jewish institution, Joods Actueel, the Jewish monthly reported Sunday. He was detained for 12 hours Friday based on footage from security cameras of him destroying the mezuzahs.
He had also placed a Koran near a synagogue, and was filmed knocking off the hat of an Orthodox Jew on the street. He shouted at Jewish passersby: “This is our land, Palestine!” and: “We will show you!”
Police are investigating allegations that Liverpool supporters directed antisemitic language towards Tottenham Hotspur players after the two sides’ heated Premier League match on Sunday.
Video footage appeared to show a Liverpool fan in the Main Stand section of Anfield using the term “Jewish c**ts” moments after Spurs forward Harry Kane converted a contentious penalty to draw the match level at 2-2.
“Three or four” fans in total were also heard calling Tottenham players “Yid c**ts”, according to a journalist covering the game.
He said: “There was about three or four people that passed me on the way out of Anfield who were engaged in it.
“One supporter spotted some Spurs fans celebrating Kane's penalty and started screaming ‘Yid c***s’ repeatedly as he left and was gesturing towards them.
“I'm sure (Liverpool’s) stadium cameras would pick him out if they provided it. Others just shouted about ‘Yids’.”
Ambassador to Warsaw Anna Azari said on Friday that there has been a wave of antisemitic verbal attacks in Poland in the days following the passage of a bill that would make it criminal to suggest that Poland was complicit in the Holocaust.
“In the last few days we could not help but notice a wave of antisemitic statements, reaching the embassy through all channels of communication,” the embassy said, adding that Azari was personally targeted in many of the messages.
While Krzysztof Czabanski, head of the National Media Council, said that “there is no place for antisemitic statements on the public media,” the embassy said that the problem is on-going.
“We would like to use this opportunity to repeat that Israel stands with Poland in using the proper term for the death camps – ‘German Nazi camps,’” the embassy statement read. “We hope that over 30 years of work and dedication of wonderful people, both in Poland and in Israel, will not be in vain and that we will be able to cooperate in an atmosphere of dialogue and shared understanding.”
An East Yorkshire MP has revealed the “torrent” of anti-Semitic abuse he received at the hands of two people while out shopping before Christmas.
Andrew Percy, Conservative MP for Goole and a recent Jewish convert, said he was accosted by a man and a woman while in Doncaster shopping.
The ex-Hull City councillor previously alleged, as reported by the Mail, that he was targeted during the snap general election last summer, with two individuals said to have “screamed” at him for being “Israeli scum” and “Zionist scum”.
The backbencher is vice-chairman of the Conservative Friends of Israel and has defended Israel’s foreign policy in the past.
Staff at a Judaica store have been left “shocked” after an anonymous caller rang the shop and said “Hitler had the best ovens”.
Brauns Judaica, in Stamford Hill, north London received the call at around 6pm yesterday.
The antisemitic comment was all that was said before the phone was put down. A member of staff at the shop told the JC: “It was very, very bad – it was very scary. If they start calling you, what’s going to be next? It’s really shocking.”
The telephone call is the latest in a number of antisemitic incidents which have taken place in Stamford Hill, including swastikas being daubed on walls and roads and members of the area’s Jewish community being subjected to verbal and physical abuse.read more
Members of the small Jewish community in the West German city of Bochum announced that they will no longer wear kippot because of attacks on them by Muslim youths.
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The news outlet Radio Bochum first reported that a representative of the community said members will stop wearing kippot in public because they are routinely faced with insults on public streets when they are recognized as Jews.
“Muslim youths attacked people of the Jewish faith,” the segment said.
Bochum is an industrial city in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia with a population of nearly 365,000. Bochum’s Jewish community, which includes the towns of Herne and Hattingen, numbers over 1,000.
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Bochum has been a hotspot for anti-Israel hatred. In 2014, some 120 activists marched to Bochum’s city hall chanting “Israel, child murderers” and “Allahu Akbar.” The anti-Israel demonstrators protested Israel’s war to stop the Islamic organization Hamas’s rocket attacks on Israeli territory.
Organisers of the first major off-site exhibition of objects and artefacts from Auschwitz have been targeted by virulent social media attacks leading up to the world premiere opening of the display in Madrid on December 1.
“People use the anonymity of social media to launch negationist and hate-filled messages. This shows us that there are still people who need to know this story,” Luis Ferreiro, the director of Spanish company Musealia, told the Daily Telegraph.
More than 100 messages have been reported to the Spanish authorities, including messages denying the Holocaust.
The exhibition features more than 600 objects from Auschwitz, including one of the freight wagons used to carry prisoners to the camp.
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.
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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.
