Unprecedented EU Poll Finds 90% Of European Jews Feel Anti-Semitism Increasing

Via Jewish Week:

Nearly 90 percent of European Jews feel that anti-Semitism has increased in their home countries over the past five years, and almost 30% say they have been harassed at least once in the past year, reveals a major European Union report published on Monday.

The poll was carried out in 12 European Union member states, and was the largest ever of its kind worldwide.

Of the more than 16,000 Jews who participated in the online survey, 85% rated anti-Semitism the biggest social or political problem in the country where they live. Thirty-eight percent said they had considered emigrating because they did not feel safe as Jews.

Britain, Germany, and Sweden saw the sharpest increases in those saying anti-Semitism is a “very big” or “fairly big” problem. The highest level recorded was in France at 95%. Denmark saw the lowest level at 56%, while Jews in Hungary suggested that anti-Semitism was becoming less of a problem. 

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Germany: Most Germans have never met a Jew

Via Handelsblatt (Mark Leonard):

[…] But since 2015, when Chancellor Angela Merkel announced her policy of Willkommenskultur (“welcoming culture”) and opened Germany’s doors to refugees fleeing the conflict in Syria, unease about resurgent anti-Semitism has been growing in the German establishment, and particularly in the Jewish community. […]  

Attacks on Jews have sparked outrage from the many Germans who thought such scenes had vanished forever from their country’s streets. But, in addition to the more visible abuses, German Jews have also begun to talk about more subtle changes in their everyday lives as major German cities like Frankfurt, Hamburg, and Berlin grow more multicultural. […]

[…] most Germans have never, and will never, meet a Jew, for the simple reason that Jews constitute a vanishingly small share of the population. Frankfurt, home to the country’s second-largest Jewish community (behind Berlin), has only 7,000 Jews, out of a metropolitan-area population of 5.7 million.

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Holland: Restaurant owner evicts Dutch Jewish community from synagogue

Via JTA:

The Jewish community of this Dutch city was evicted Monday from its former synagogue in what members said was the first such occurrence in years in the kingdom.  

Members of Beth Shoshanna, a Masorti/Conservative Jewish congregation of approximately 30 people, packed up and loaded into a van their Torah scroll and other scripture, as well as other items used for worship and furniture.  The move followed a legal fight against the building’s new owners, who are seeking to turn it into a restaurant.  

“It’s a very heavy feeling that this thing can happen here in 2018,” said Tom Furstenberg, the community’s chairman.  

His community had been told to move out by the office of Ayhan Sahin, a Dutch-Turkish developer and owner of several eateries, who in January bought the building housing the Great Synagogue of Deventer with a partner. Last week, the city blocked his plan to open an eatery in the 125-year-old synagogue. But as the owners, Sahin and his associate can still determine who has access to the building and have asked the congregation to move out, according to Sanne Terlouw, a member of the congregation.  

The community has found a new home in the nearby municipality of Raalte. “We will continue. But this means the end of centuries of Jewish life in Deventer itself,” Terlouw said.

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A Frightening Look at the Rise of Anti-Semitism in France

Via Daily Beast:

For the Durans, a lack of security has compelled them to abandon the French flat they’ve called their own for the past decade in order to relocate to Israel. It’s a move that none of them are happy to undertake, in large part because they all admit they feel more connected to France (their native land) than to their destination. Yet thanks to horror stories such as one told by their oldest son—in which a friend was being beaten by attackers, and a passerby, upon hearing that the assaulted kid was Jewish, told the thugs, “Well carry on, that’s fine”—they now feel as if their backs are up against a wall.

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Europe: Time to leave? The question that Jews must ponder

Via Commentary Magazine (Melanie Phillips):

[…] The same people who claim to see anti-Semitism in European populism or the political base of Donald Trump regularly accuse Jews of claiming anti-Semitism just to “sanitize the crimes of Israel” or “bring down Jeremy Corbyn.”

This reaction is worse, far worse, than the anti-Semitism itself. It’s worse even than indifference. For it imputes to the Jews malicious intent in claiming that Jewish people are being maliciously targeted. It says they are lying. It blames the Jews for their own victimization.

This reaction is the inescapable evidence that the Jews are being abandoned. Those of us who have loved Britain for its gentleness, its tolerance, its decency, its stoicism, its reasonableness, and the dampness of both its weather and national temperament feel as if we have been orphaned. But maybe we were living all along in a fool’s paradise.

Some people think Europe is over, that the demographics are against it and that it will become a majority-Muslim culture in a few decades. My guess is that Europe won’t go down without a fight. If that happens, the Jews are likely to get it in the neck from all sides. Whichever way it goes, it’s not a pleasant prospect.

So is it time to leave? It’s very personal, and I wouldn’t presume to advise anyone what to do. I can only speak for myself and say that for some years now, I’ve been spending a great deal of my time in Israel. Because even with 150,000 Hezbollah rockets pointing at us from Lebanon, even with Hamas trying every day to murder us, and even with Iran working toward its genocide bomb to wipe us out, Israel is where I feel so much safer and the air is so much sweeter, and it’s where Jews are not on their knees and where no one will ever make me feel I am not entitled to live and don’t properly belong.

Israel is where we have astonishingly renewed ourselves as a nation out of the ashes of the Shoah. Israel is where all those who want us gone meet their nemesis in the political realization of the eternal people. Israel is the ultimate, and ultimately the only, definitive and triumphant repudiation of anti-Semitism and the true vindication of the millions of us who perished in the unspeakable events that we memorialize on Holocaust Memorial Day.

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Sweden: Jewish group shuts down after Nazi threats

Via The Local:

Sweden’s most northerly Jewish community group has closed down following a succession of threats from neo-Nazi groups.

The Jewish Association in the city of Umeå shut itself down at a board meeting at the end of May.

“It’s a heavy blow. I’m very sad about it, and have even shed a few tears,” said Carinne Sjöberg, the Liberal Party politician who chaired the association. “In some way, it feels like we lost.”

In a tweet, Sweden's Jewish Youth Association thanked Sjöberg and other board members for the work they had done since the group was established in 2010.

"This means that there is no Jewish organisation in Sweden north of Uppsala," it wrote.

 The association moved out of its premises in April last year, after swastikas were painted on the walls alongside antisemitic stickers which included pictures of the Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, the text ‘we know where you live’.

Association members also received threatening emails and Sjöberg was even visited at her home.

According to the Dagens Nyheter newspaper, the threats came predominantly from the neo-Nazi Nordic Resistance Movement, which has been growing in strength in recent years, and is very active in northern Sweden.

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France: Can a Jew love France?

Via The New York Times (Alexander Aciman):

[...] But things are not so dreamy for Jews today in France. The country is struggling to maintain and protect its large Jewish population, the third largest in the world, which has been dwindling precipitously thanks to the wave of anti-Semitism that has gripped the country over the past decade. In 2015 — the year of the Charlie Hebdo attack — 8,000 Jews left France and headed for Israel.

My grandfather made a go at living in Paris in the 1960s, but found himself an outsider in a country still reeling from a war of roundups and deportations. This broke his heart, for he too felt that Paris was his real home.

France failed to make good for my grandfather on the promissory cultural note of the Alliance Israélite Universelle. The organization’s purpose was to lift Jews out of their benighted surroundings and offer them the tools to make a go at life in Europe. It was the promise of a country that took pride in being more civilized than the ones that would eventually expel all of their Jewish populations.

Today such distinction feels more blurred and more difficult to defend than at any point since World War II.

What hurts most about this realization is that it directly contradicts what Jews like me feel must also necessarily be true: France is our home, as if somewhere in the universe there is a real France, and the one in Europe is just a facsimile that keeps falling off the anti-Semitism wagon.

French-speaking Jews may have celebrated this year when Emmanuel Macron’s party, La République En Marche!, defeated the frighteningly far-right and anti-Semitic National Front, but this supposedly new France has done nothing to curb its Jewish problem. Every year in France Jewish storefronts are vandalized, including arson in kosher supermarkets this past week.

The general feeling of unrest is not unlike the one felt over 100 years ago during the Dreyfus Affair, when it became clear to many that Jewish life in France was ultimately unsustainable. For many, the situation has started feeling untenable again today. Anti-Semitism, as it turns out, is a flat circle. And yet, despite all the betrayal and heartbreak, I cannot bring myself to renounce France, as if after more than a century of love for this country, the love itself has become part of my genome. Generations removed from the work of the Alliance, its effects continue to exist in me.

I feel as ridiculous admitting that I am not French as I do saying that I am. I know all the transfer points of the Paris Metro. Like my father, I studied French literature at university. My favorite days in New York are those when it rains, because on those days the city reminds me of Paris.

I cannot resolve the idea that the place where I feel that I belong wants nothing to do with me. I struggle to accept the terrible truth, which is that many of my fellow Jews in France are feeling today those early warning tremors of disaster felt by French Jews in the early 1900s and the 1930s. I tell myself that in 30 years I’ll be back home, and my kids will be sitting and chatting under the heat lamps at cafes and picking up terrible premature smoking habits, when really I know that in that time there will probably no longer be any Jews left in France at all. But like any good French person, I just shrug one of those inscrutable shrugs and say something like “C’est de la politique.” Politics, right? Suspended in a strange gray space of muddled allegiances, like my grandfather, I realize that though I may feel French and though I want my children to grow up speaking French, the France my family dreamed of no longer exists — and maybe never did.

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Germany: Merkel’s antisemitism envoy ‘not surprised’ Jews want to leave

   
Via Guardian:   

A newly appointed special envoy tasked by the German government with tackling the country’s rising wave of antisemitism has said he is not surprised that, following a series of high-profile race hate attacks, Jews are considering leaving Germany.

Felix Klein, who is due to take up his post this week, said he plans to launch a nationwide register to chart all crimes against the country’s estimated 100,000-strong Jewish community, saying antisemitic attitudes were mainstream in German society.

“It is quite understandable that those who are scared for the safety of their children would consider leaving Germany,” he said at his first discussion with journalists in Berlin. “I hear this from my own Jewish friends. But we must do everything to avoid that.”

Klein said that he hoped to gain a better overview of what was fuelling such antisemitism and to “tackle it like a surgeon”.

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France: 300 personalities denounce a "quiet ethnic purging" of Jews

Via I 24 News/AFP:

'French Jews are 25 times more at risk of being attacked than their fellow Muslim citizens,' says manifesto

More than 300 French dignitaries and stars [many of whom are Jewish] have signed a manifesto denouncing a "new anti-Semitism" marked by "Islamist radicalization" after a string of killings of Jews, to be published in Le Figaro newspaper Sunday.

The country's half-a-million-plus Jewish community is the largest in Europe but has been hit by a wave of emigration to Israel in the past two decades, partly due to the emergence of virulent anti-Semitism in predominantly immigrant neighbourhoods.

"We demand that the fight against this democratic failure that is anti-Semitism becomes a national cause before it's too late. Before France is no longer France," reads the manifesto co-signed by politicians from the left and right including ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy and celebrities like actor Gerard Depardieu. The signatories condemned what they called a "quiet ethnic purging" driven by rising Islamist radicalism particularly in working-class neighborhoods. They also accused the media of remaining silent on the matter.

"In our recent history, 11 Jews have been assassinated -- and some tortured -- by radical Islamists because they were Jewish," the declaration said.

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Sweden: Son of Holocaust survivor explains why he left Sweden to Israel

Via The Times of Israel (Stefan Shaul Lindmark):

Madam Foreign Minister! I’m here now. You know, in Israel. Just like I said I would be. I wrote to you two years ago, you may remember. And I told you about the people who built the state of Israel; the survivors of the Holocaust, the Jews expelled from the Arab world and Iran, and who were robbed of all of their possessions, the Ethiopian Jews who walked through the deserts of death, the Soviet Jews who fled from the anti-Semitism and all the other Jews who have moved here to live together with the Jews who have lived here for generations.

Madam Foreign Minister, now I am one of them – I, the son of a survivor from the Holocaust. I, who have lived all my life in Sweden and have served the country as a soldier, as an ambulance nurse, as a therapist and above all as, a lecturer of the Holocaust and its consequences. I have left a Sweden that is no longer the country I have known my whole life. Sweden, a country that has changed further over the years since I wrote to you – and the change is not for the better.

Madam Foreign Minister, I’m leaving Sweden where violence, gangs fight for territory, power and “respect”, shootings, rape and especially gang rapes have become the norm – my Sweden which is now a country where anti-Semitism is dramatically increasing even further, a country whose government suffers from at severe case of megalomania and believes itself to be morally superior to any other country in the entire world. (...)  

Madam Foreign Minister, since I last wrote to you Sweden has adapted to hearing people screaming in the streets that “Jews are the offspring of monkeys and pigs” and “shoot the Jews”. Without ramification. Petrol bombs have been thrown against my synagogue and against the chapel in Malmö. The Jewish community center pays 53% of its budget, based on their members’ fees, on its own security. But you don’t want to see this, you did not want to hear the warning signs, you who habitually will blame Israel like you always do – my Israel – to be the cause of all evil in the world. And then you wonder why the Swedish Jews leave. In the Jewish Chronicle you claim not to understand why Jews want to leave to Sweden in order to move to a life “behind walls”.  

But Mrs Foreign Minister, if the interview was made on the Jewish community’s premises, you had to cross the high fences, the walls and security controls in order to enter. The fences and walls that make the Jews safe in Sweden. There are plenty of people in Sweden who want to kill us. So what is the fundamental difference between the fences and walls of Jewish institutions in Sweden and fences and walls against those who want to kill and hurt people in Israel? Who can we trust? Not those who are aiding and abetting. Not those who make hollow promises. Not those who lay the blame on the victims and coddle and defend the perpetrators. The history of experience has taught us that we can only trust ourselves against those who want to kill us.

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French historian: 60 000 Jews have left France in last ten years and Europe will empty itself of its Jews

Le Monde has interviewed Marc Knobel, CRIF's historian and director of studies, in the wake of the murder of Mireille Knoll, 85 (Jews Are Being Murdered in Paris. Again.):

"How do you see the future?

I do not know what to think anymore. I will stay in this country anyway, but I feel that many people will be leaving. In fact, 60,000 have left France in the space of ten years out of a community of around 500,000. I think the trend will not stop. People are afraid for their children and now for their parents too. All the conditions are right, once the bewilderment subsides, for them to say to themselves that they have nothing to do here. The number of people leaving France will grow. In other European countries too, where the situation is also tense, even if there have been no killings [of Jews] - and that's not a small difference. Europe will empty itself of its Jews."

(Google translation)

read more in French

European Parliament admits Jewish population is diminishing in the European Union

In an non-official document "prepared for, and addressed to, the Members and staff of the European Parliament as background material to assist them in their parliamentary work" acknowledges that the Jewish population in the European Union is declining.  In 2915 it stood at a little above 1 million.  It is clear from the document that there is nothing it can do to reverse the situation.

Jewish communities in the European Union

The Jewish population in the EU has been declining. It dropped from around 1.12 million in 2009 to 1.08 million in 2015, though it is difficult to give precise numbers as some countries do not collect ethnic data. The Jewish population in France, the largest in the EU, declined from about 500,000 in 2002 to 460,000 in 2015. Emigration, mainly to Israel, is the main factor behind the trend, which has intensified in recent years, among other things due to harassment, discrimination and hate crimes against Jews.  

Diminishing Jewish population  

Centuries ago, Jews were persecuted as a religious minority, while in the last century the belief that Jews were a threat to the state was a driving force behind the Holocaust. Today Jews are targeted mainly because of events in the Middle East, although some anti-Semitic sentiments also revolve around the Holocaust. According to a 2015 report by the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA), the main perpetrators of anti-Semitic incidents are neo-Nazis, far-right or far-left sympathisers, Muslim fundamentalists and the younger generation. The report states that anti-Semitic behaviour is mainly characterised by denial and trivialisation of the Holocaust, glorification of the Nazi past, anti-Semitic sentiment due to property-restitution laws and hatred because of Israeli policies. It includes verbal and physical violence; threats; insults of Jews going to synagogues; harassment of rabbis; repeated attacks on Jews wearing symbols of their religion; hate speech; anti-Semitic bullying in schools; and damage to property, including arson.

Growing violence against Jews Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, encouraged French Jews to come to Israel after the killings of kosher supermarket customers in Paris in January 2015, four years after a deadly attack on a Jewish school in Toulouse. Many Jews have considered following his advice, although some eventually return. According to a 2013 survey on anti-Semitism in eight EU Member States, 21% of respondents experienced verbal or physical violence or harassment because they were Jews. The numbers may underestimate the reality, since 76% of victims of anti-Semitic hate crime do not report it. 

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On the same subject:
Joël Rubinfeld, president of the Belgian League against Anti-Semitism, warned: Europe: Ours will be the last significant generation of European Jews

Europe: Ours will be the last significant generation of European Jews

Joël Rubinfeld, president of the Belgian League Against Anti-Semitism, attended the 6th Global Forum for Combating Antisemitism in Jerusalem. Upon his return, Mr. Rubinfeld was interviewed by Radio Judaica in Brussels about the future of Jewish communities in Belgium and in Europe. He declared:

"The few days I spent in Israel have not made me change my optimism or my pessimism about the situation and the way I view it.  I am a pessimist who fights.  I fear - and I sincerely hope that I am mistaken - that our generation will represent, in history books, the last significant generation of European Jews.

In 30 years, in 40 years, in 50 years, there will still be, of course, Jews in Europe but far fewer than today."

read more @ Philosémitisme blog (in French)

On the same topic:
Leading European Rabbi: ‘I have never heard so many concerned voices from my fellow Rabbis at the situation affecting Jewry in Europe’

Europe: Jews, get the hell out of Europe – taste freedom!

Via The Jerusalem Post (Brenda Katten):

(...) Is this freedom enjoyed by Jews living in Europe? Do they feel comfortable openly criticizing their government? Do they write articles in their national press pointing out all that they feel is wrong with their leaders? Is Arfa so content with the German government that she has no need to criticize them publicly? As a resident of Netanya, I wander through its main Independence Square and the language I most hear is French. [Note: approximately 200,000 Franco-Israelis reside in Israel and several thousand make alyah every year - others leave France tp go to the United States Canada...]

Why have French Jews chosen to come here? It is not because they expect to have a more affluent life or to live without the fear of the possibility of war.

They are here because they have the freedom to be Jewish. 

Is a higher standard of living compensation for experiencing antisemitism in all its forms? Sadly, history has proven that a well-filled purse in the Diaspora is more attractive than starting life anew in a country with a strange language that requires its 18-year-olds to enlist in defense forces so that others may live. It is considerably easier for an 18-year-old overseas to ponder which university to attend.

Have we not witnessed time and again how Jews have chosen to stay in the economic comfort of their country of birth? Too many who initially had the chance to leave Europe prior to World War II chose, instead, to remain, ending their lives in the gas chambers.

Perhaps the paragraph of Arfa’s article that disturbed me the most was, “Unlike the 1930s and 1940s, Jews have a place to go that will always welcome them, and maybe because of Israel’s existence Europe will not repeat the Holocaust.

Now Jews have a state of their own that will have their back, ideally, and that should inspire them to bravely, confidently walk the streets with a kippa… fight court decisions that undermine Jews and Israel… and even bear arms.”

Confidently walk the streets with a kippa? I wonder what Europe Arfa is talking about. When the rabbinate there is advising Jews not to walk the streets with kippot and when it is quite possible that the next prime minister of the UK will be blatantly antisemitic, does she really expect Jews to bear arms in Europe? Most disturbing is the notion that it is okay to let the Jews in Israel ensure that the Jews in the Diaspora have somewhere to escape to without recognizing that a key reason that some young people are leaving Israel could be because they do not want to be the ones to sacrifice their lives for those who choose to live in greater financial comfort elsewhere.

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The writer is public relations chair of ESRA, which promotes integration into Israeli society

Polish Jews stunned, scared by eruption of anti-Semitism

Via ABC News:

Matylda Jonas-Kowalik has spent most of her 22 years secure in the belief that she would never know the discrimination, persecution or violence that killed or traumatized generations of Polish Jews before her. She once thought the biggest problem that young Jewish Poles like herself faced was finding a Jewish boyfriend or girlfriend in a country dominated by Catholics.

But an eruption of anti-Semitic comments in public debates amid a diplomatic dispute with Israel over a new Holocaust speech law has caused to her to rethink that certainty. Now she and others fear the hostile rhetoric could eventually trigger anti-Semitic violence, and she finds herself thinking constantly about whether she should leave Poland.

"This is my home. I have never lived anywhere else and wanted this to keep being my home," said Jonas-Kowalik, a Jewish studies major at Warsaw University. "But this makes me very anxious. I don't know what to expect."

(...)

Anna Chipczynska, the head of Warsaw's Jewish community, said members feel psychologically shaken or even depressed, and that the hostile rhetoric has triggered hateful phone calls and emails and other harassment.

In recent events, two men tried to urinate in front of Warsaw's historic Nozyk Synagogue, and then shouted obscenities when security guards intervened. One Jewish community member found a Star of David hanging from gallows spray-painted outside a window of his apartment. A woman found the word "Zyd" — Polish for "Jew" — written in the snow outside her home.

Agnieszka Ziatek of the Jewish Agency for Israel said she has seen a spike in the number of Polish Jews inquiring about immigrating to Israel.

(...)

Mikolaj Grynberg, a writer and photographer, said while young Polish Jews feel shocked and "lost," he, at 52, has long been aware of Poland's anti-Semitic undercurrent. While on book tours, Grynberg said people would sometimes ask him "why did you choose to write in our language?" as if he weren't as Polish as they.

As the descendant of Warsaw Ghetto survivors, he has faced years of hateful emails and online messages and says he has been prepared psychologically for a return of bad times.

"Each time you have an anti-Semitic wave, there are Jewish people who leave," Grynberg said. "It's not just a whim: It's about their fear. Jewish people know what can come after."

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France: Islamic anti-Semitism towards ethnic cleansing

Via Gatestone Institute (Guy Millière):

(...) The French Jewish community may still be the largest in Europe, but it is shrinking rapidly. In 2000, it was estimated at 500,000, but the number now is less than 400,000, and sinking. Jewish districts that once were thriving are now on the verge of extinction. "What is happening is an ethnic cleansing that dare not speak its name. In few decades, there will be no Jews in France," according to Richard Abitbol, ​​president of the Confederation of French Jews and Friends of Israel.

Without the Jews of France, France would no longer be France, said Former Prime Minister Manuel Valls in 2016 . But he did not do anything.

Recently he said that he had done his best, that he could not have done more. "The problem," he said, "is that anti-Semitism today in France comes less from the far right than from individuals of the Muslim faith or culture".

He added that in France, for at least two decades, all attacks against Jews in which the perpetrator has been identified have come from Muslims, and that the most recent attacks were no exception.

Valls, however, quickly suffered the consequences of his candor. He was elbowed to the margins of political life. Muslim websites called him an " agent of the Jewish lobby" and a "racist." Former leaders of his own party, such as former Foreign Minister Roland Dumas, said that Valls' wife is a Jew and hinted that he was "under the influence".

In France, telling the truth about Islamic anti-Semitism is dangerous. For a politician, it is suicidal.  (...)

In French Muslim neighborhoods, Islamist imams denounce the "bad influence" of Jews and spread anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. French politicians stay silent.

Islamic bookstores in France sell books banned elsewhere, such as the fraudulent Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and CDs and DVDs of violent anti-Semitic speeches by radical preachers. For instance, Yussuf al-Qaradawi, the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, who is prohibited from entering France and the US, says he regrets that Hitler did not "finish the job". French politicians stay silent.

Although synagogues in France have not been attacked since 2014, they all are guarded around the clock by armed soldiers in bulletproof vests who are protected behind sandbags, as are Jewish schools and cultural centers. (...)

A growing percentage of the French say that the Jews in France are "too numerous" and "too visible."

Reports for the Ministry of National Education reveal that expressions such as "Don't act like a Jew", intended to criticize a student who hides what he thinks, are widely used in public schools. Jewish students are more and more often the object of mockery -- and not just by students who are Muslim.

A few days ago, the comedian Laura Laune was the winner on the reality television series "France's Got Talent". Some of her jokes make fun of the fact that there were fewer Jews in the world in 1945 than in 1939. Jewish organizations protested, but in vain. Now, she appears to packed halls. The anti-Semitic comedian Dieudonné also fills the stadiums where he performs.

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Miss Germany 2011 kept her Jewish heritage a secret and moved to America

Via The Jewish Telegraphic Agency:

Last week, the story of a Jewish woman competing in the Miss Germany competition went viral, appearing in JTA along with media outlets around the world. Tamar Morali, 21, said organizers told her she was the first Jewish woman to get this far in the beauty pageant.

It turns out the story — and the world of beauty pageants in general — isn’t as straightforward as it seems.

In 2011, a Jewish woman, Valeria Bystritskaia, was crowned Miss Germany. But out of fear of anti-Semitism Bystritskaia, a Russia native who moved to Germany at the age of 7, kept her Jewish heritage a secret. (...)

Bystritskaia, 31, is the Moscow-born daughter of a Ukrainian-Jewish mother and Russian father. In 1993, she told JTA, she and her mother moved to Germany to escape anti-Semitism, eventually settling in the city of Karlsruhe. Her mother warned her not to tell anyone about her Jewish heritage, though Bystritskaia said she was bullied in school for being a foreigner.

At 17, she was discovered by a modeling agent, and after four years of modeling she entered her first beauty pageant. She went on to win more than 30 titles, and at age 25 she was crowned Miss Universe Germany. She represented Germany in the Miss Universe 2011 pageant, although she did not place in the top 16.

Bystritskaia said organizers never asked about her religious background and she did not tell anyone, so the fact that she was Jewish was never reported.

Following her victory, however, Bystritskaia experienced anti-Semitic harassment on social media. She said she’s still not sure how people found out about her Jewish background.

“The worst was someone who wrote ‘Hitler forgot about her and her family,'” she told JTA in an email this week.

That spurred her to leave the country.

“It was that reaction, in fact, that convinced me that I couldn’t live as a Jew in Germany,” she said. “My title period ended in 2012, and by 2013, I had moved to America.”

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France: Up to 8,000 Jews leave France each year

Valeurs Actuelles has a piece by Rachel Binhas about antisemitism in France:

Each year, several thousand French Jews leave to Israel, the United Kingdom or America. BNVCA (Bureau of Vigilance against anti-Semitism) puts the figure at between 6,000 and 8,000 Jews.

There is also an internal displacement phenomenon.   In the Île-de-France region many Jews move to safer areas. "In Sarcelles, branded the "Little Jerusalem", the synagogues now stand empty," says Marc Bensimhon, the Pinto family lawyer and a member of the BNVCA.

This year, in Noisy-le-Grand (Seine-Saint-Denis), a Jewish family discovered a kalashnikov bullet and a note with insults in their mailbox.  At Anet (Eure-et-Loir) another family got the message: "Hitler was right, all Jews should have been burnt in ovens".

While Jews account for less than 1% of the population, they are the target of half the racist acts committed in France. In the last fifteen years, the individuals involved in these acts are mostly of Muslim origin, very far from the skinhead affiliated to the extreme right.

read the article (in French) & Valeurs Actuelles

Related:
France: 60,000 Jews have moved out of Ile-de-France in the last 10 years

Switzerland: More Swiss Jews now live in Israel than in Switzerland

Via BZ Basel (Annika Bangerter):

When the plane from Basel flies over the rolling fields heading to the Ben Gurion airport, emigrants from Basel will not be looking at the Tel Aviv skyline for the first time. They know the city and Israel from previous visits to relatives and from the long summer holidays.  The blazing heat, the bustling sea, the narrow streets: all this is familiar to them when they move from Basel to the Promised Land. 

It is becoming increasingly common. In 2010, around 15,000 Swiss men and women were living in Israel.  Last year there were 19,000 Swiss living in Israel. Today, Israel counts more inhabitants with a red Swiss passport than Jews living in Switzerland. 

Nearly 18,000 Jews live in Switzerland. What makes the Swiss of the Jewish faith go to the Promised Land? What do they expect from their lives? And the fulfillment of their aspirations? That is what «Schweiz am Wochenende» wanted to find out, exactly 120 years after the Basel Zionist Congress - one of the most important milestones in the history of the Jewish state.

read the article in German

France: Jews are now leaving their country in large numbers

Via Jewish Review of Books (Michel Gurfinkiel reviews James Kirchick's book, The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age):

(...) It is not, of course, from the right that the existential threat to the Jews of France has emerged, but from the very immigrants its rhetoric and policies have targeted (which is not, of course, to say that the National Front is philo-Semitic either). The “home to both the largest Jewish population,” as Kirchik writes, “and the largest Muslim population on the continent,” France has become a notoriously dangerous place for Jews. “Anti-Semitic attacks in France comprise 51 percent of all hate crimes even though Jews represent less than 1 percent of the population.” Most of this anti-Semitic violence, from harassment to arson, murder, and pogrom-like street violence, is perpetrated by radicalized Muslims. In 2006, there was the famous, horrific “kidnapping, three-week-long torture, and murderous dismemberment of twenty-one-year-old Ilan Halimi” in Paris by a Muslim-led gang who called themselves “the Barbarians.” In 2012, Mohammed Merah, an Islamist activist of Algerian descent, murdered or maimed four soldiers in Toulouse and Montauban in Southern France and then killed a Jewish teacher and three Jewish preteen children in Toulouse at point blank. In 2014, “at the height of the Gaza War, what can only be described as a pogrom descended on the Don Isaac Abravanel synagogue” in Paris. 

A crowd of several hundred people, chanting “Death to Jews” [in Arabic] and wielding iron bars and axes, tried to break into the building where about 200 worshippers were caught inside . . . Though French police rushed to the scene, one witness reported that, had it not been for members of the vigilante Jewish Defense League, “the synagogue would have been destroyed.” 

In 2015, in the wake of a mass shooting of journalists at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in central Paris, an ISIS supporter of Malian descent shot a policewoman near a Jewish school in Montrouge in southern Paris, and then, the following day, killed four hostages at a kosher supermarket in eastern Paris. 

As recently as April 2017, as we were about to elect a new president in France, a 66-year-old Orthodox Jewish kindergarten director was tortured for an hour in her home in Paris by a young Muslim neighbor who was heard shouting “Allahu Akbar.” After throwing her lifeless body out of the window of her third-story apartment, he prayed. Although police at the scene delayed storming the apartment while waiting for the anti-terrorist unit, there is currently a roiling public controvesy as to whether this will be prosecuted as a hate crime. These are but the headlines of daily life in France over the last decade. 

No wonder then that the French Jews, in spite of their remarkable achievements as a community since 1945 and their no less remarkable contribution to French culture, are now leaving their country in large numbers. Two thousand French Jews emigrated to Israel in 2011. Four years later, Kirchick reports, the number had quadrupled. In fact, the decline is steeper than even these numbers suggest, for one has also to take into account those French Jews who settle in Israel as students or visitors without formally undertaking aliyah, not to speak of those who opt for other countries. Kirchick quotes the famous remarks of then–prime minister Manuel Valls after the January 2015 killing spree in Paris: 

Manuel Valls, the son of Spanish immigrants, declared, “If 100,000 French people of Spanish origin were to leave, I would never say that France is not France anymore. But if 100,000 Jews leave, France will no longer be France.” 

At the present rate of emigration, this will take no more than two decades, probably much less. And yet even if we Jews stay, France, and its Muslim communities, must figure out how they will be integrated into a modern democratic society if France is to remain a viable nation. 

Radical Islamic brotherhoods and preachers seem to understand their migration to an originally non-Muslim Europe as part of a religious-political conquest, and many Muslims in France seem to accept this radical Islamist proposition at some level. On this understanding, Europe’s very acquiescence to a multicultural, multi-ethnic, and multi-religious societal model appears to be an admission of weakness. Ironically, they have a point. The political class has, too often, been unable to confront immigrant communities, even when basic legal and societal norms are challenged. Muslim neighborhoods have indeed been turned into “no-go zones,” not ghettoes where minorities are secluded, but areas from which non-Muslims have been de facto expelled. 

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