Georgia set to open cultural center in Jerusalem

Via JNS:

Georgia is set to open a cultural center in Jerusalem, becoming the eighth country to do so, its Israel embassy confirmed on Thursday.

A spokesperson for the Georgian Embassy said it has not been decided yet when or where the center will open, and that details are still being discussed.

“We welcome the center’s opening,” said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Office.

Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely applauded the decision, saying “more and more countries are joining the historic process that began with the U.S., and are recognizing the historic connection between the Jewish people and Jerusalem.”

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UK: London synagogue and shops targeted with antisemitic graffiti

Via Guardian:

Antisemitic graffiti sprayed across a synagogue and shops in north London during the Jewish festival of Hanukah has been condemned as “disgusting” and “senseless”.

The Jewish holy symbol and the numbers 911 were spray-painted in red and purple on premises in the Hampstead and Belsize Park area, including South Hampstead Synagogue. The numbers may refer to an antisemitic conspiracy theory that Jews were responsible for the 9/11 terror attack; others fear it is a reference to Kristallnacht, the violent pogrom against Jews on 9 November 1938 in Nazi Germany.

Police are investigating the incident as a suspected racially motivated hate crime. The defacement coincided with a knife attack in New York at a rabbi’s home, which injured five people.

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Slovakia: Headstones vandalized at second Jewish cemetery

Via JTA:

More than 20 headstones were vandalized at a Jewish cemetery in northern Slovakia in the second such incident in the country in a week.

The 22 gravestones vandalized at a Jewish cemetery in the country’s northern town of Rajec appear to have been damaged in mid-December, according to the World Jewish Congress. The vandalism is currently under investigation by police.

The 60 gravestones knocked down and set on fire in the Jewish cemetery of Námestovo, a town in northern Slovakia near the Polish border, were discovered on December 16.

It is not known yet whether the two incidents are connected.

Anti-Semitic incidents of this nature are extremely rare in Slovakia, according to the World Jewish Congress.

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Holland: To stay safe, Dutch synagogue operates by invitation only

Via Politico:

Amid a surge of anti-Semitic attacks across Europe, Groningen’s Jewish community is keeping a low profile.

Every other week, as the Jewish holiday of Shabbat approaches in the Dutch city of Groningen, another, more mundane ritual takes place. A group of self-appointed volunteers begin calling around and texting friends on WhatsApp.

They are confirming the attendance of fellow members of the Jewish community at that week’s Saturday morning service.

Amid growing fears of violent anti-Semitism following several attacks on Jewish institutions across Europe, the Groningen synagogue — like many others — now operates behind fortified defenses, and in a nearly covert fashion.

The community has an emergency plan in case of an attack, and local police keep watch on site during services. It doesn’t publish details of its services, and relies on worshippers to keep each other informed of the schedule and muster up attendance in private chat groups and over the phone. Members are trained to vet visitors at the entrance.

For an outsider, the congregation has become easy to overlook — and that’s, partly, the point.

Alec Farber, 18, who moved to Groningen to study from New York, missed a number of holy days before he realized a congregation existed. He finally gained entry to a service after making friends with other Jewish students. He had to bring identification, and flag his arrival in advance.

"It was actively difficult," Farber said of the process. Back in the United States, he said, "my synagogue posts every service on its website.”

For many, the difficult logistics are a small price to pay to keep the congregation safe from the type of violent attacks that have devastated other Jewish communities in recent years. […]

The incident in Halle is a turning point, warned David Gurov, a 20-year-old student originally from Cologne, whose friend was barricaded in the German synagogue as the gunman tried to force his way in.

"History is getting forgotten,” he said. “And the layer that was holding back anti-Semitism from growing has been breached."

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Germany: The young German Jews who left everything behind and moved to Israel

Via DW:

Increasing anti-Semitism and a general feeling of foreignness are pushing more and more German Jews to move to Israel. Despite the many obstacles that stand in the way, they seem to have no regrets.

People who were born and raised in Israel are not used to hearing that their upbringing is something to be envious of. The country is engaged in a bloody conflict with the Palestinians, military service is compulsory and it has one of the highest inequality rates in the West. Israelis also work some of the longest hours among states within the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. These statistics do not make Israel an obvious immigration destination, particularly when coming from Germany - another OECD member that tops Israel in a number of key areas, including average wages and PISA performance. But for some German Jews, the dry figures are irrelevant. They decided to move to Israel anyway - and they have no regrets.

"Can you really leave your house as a Jew in Germany without being treated like a museum exhibit? Not really," says Alon Kogan, a 22-year-old who was born in Offenbach and moved to Israel in 2015. "I always felt like I was a tourist attraction almost," he recalls. "Here, I no longer feel like an outsider."

Growing up near Frankfurt, Kogan was one of more than 6,500 Jews living in the area. Still, that didn't make him feel more comfortable about his religion. "People would always whisper 'look! Here are Jews! Look at what they're wearing!' if a group of Orthodox men would cross the street. It's like they were still amazed that there are Jews out there," he says.

Anti-Semitic incidents were also present in Kogan's surrounding. "Nothing major ever happened to me, but friends would always tell about incidents here and there," he says. "After finishing high school, a friend told me about his positive migration to Israel. I just felt like I wanted to do it too, like it was the right thing for me."

Maya Rosenfeld, 22, also moved to Israel three years ago. "I was tired of explaining myself all the time. Tired of explaining Judaism to the world," she remembers. "People would ask me why Jews circumcize their children or demanded that I interpret Israel's policies. Why is it my job? Educate yourself on your own."

When she was in school in Cologne, somebody wrote "Jewish pig" on her chair. Another time, someone told her that Jews were responsible for 9/11 and falsely claimed that no Jews were killed in the attacks. "This is simply not true. Just Google it," she remembers answering.

In another instance, a fellow pupil brought a newspaper to class and asked her what she was doing to the people of Gaza. "For him, I was somehow responsible for this because I'm Jewish," Rosenfeld says. But having to explain who she was didn't stop after high school: "You would think people in their 30s are more educated about Jews than schoolchildren. But even during my apprenticeship weird questions just kept coming." Rosenfeld claims to have several Jewish friends back in Germany who hide their identity to avoid conflict. But for her, it was not an option. So, in 2016, she decided to move. "I could no longer feel like a stranger in my own land," she says.

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France: Who desecrated a Jewish cemetery near Strasbourg?

Gavin Mortimer @ The Spectator:

As to the identity of those who desecrated a Jewish cemetery at the start of this month, daubing scores of headstones with Swastikas, that could be the far-right, far-left or Islamist extremists. Such is the prevalence of anti-Semitism in France.

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Germany: Parliament resolution to ban Hezbollah is just a legal charade

Via Gatestone Institute:

- Germany, however, has refused to ban Hezbollah's "political wing," which continues to raise funds in the country. A German foreign ministry official, Niels Annen, has said that such a ban would be counterproductive because "we focus on dialogue." His comment has been understood to mean that the German government does not want to burn bridges with Hezbollah's sponsor, the Islamic Republic of Iran.

- "We don't have a military wing and a political one; we don't have Hezbollah on one hand and the resistance party on the other.... Every element of Hezbollah, from commanders to members as well as our various capabilities, is in the service of the resistance, and we have nothing but the resistance as a priority." — Hezbollah's deputy secretary general, Naim Qassem.

- Germany's Social Democratic Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, however, has refused to ban Hezbollah in its entirety. He recently repeated the German government's distinction between Hezbollah's legitimate and illegitimate activities in Germany.

- "It remains to be seen to what extent the German federal government will… actually 'exhaust all the resources of the rule of law' to stop Hezbollah's money laundering and terrorist financing in Germany."- Bild, December 19, 2019.

The German parliament has passed a non-binding resolution that calls on the German government to ban the activities of the Iran-backed Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah - Arabic for "The Party of Allah" - in Germany.

The measure - supported by center-right Christian Democrats and the center-left Social Democrats, the two major parties that make up Germany's ruling coalition, and also by the classical liberal Free Democrats - has been hailed as "important," "significant," and a "crucial step."

The resolution, however, falls short of a complete ban on Hezbollah and appears aimed at providing the German government with political cover that would allow Germany to claim that it has banned the group even if it has not.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has faced increasing international pressure to ban Hezbollah, but she has refused to do so. Hezbollah has more than 1,000 operatives in Germany, according to German intelligence assessments.

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Germany: Peace event excludes Jewish politician for his anti-BDS stance

Via The Jerusalem Post:

The Munich Peace Conference has rejected the Jewish city councilman Marian Offman as a speaker at the event allegedly because of his opposition to the Boycott, Sanctions, Divestment movement targeting Israel, sparking accusations of antisemitism against the conference organizers.

According to a Monday report in the Munich-based broadsheet Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ), the organizer of the conference Thomas Rödl confirmed Offman’s stance on Israel is one of the reasons for his exclusion, stating that the Social Democratic politician, who is also a member of Munich’s Jewish community, “dealt aggressively and in a polarizing way with political groups and events that critically assess the policies of the government of Israel.”

Offman told SZ that the fact that the organizers of the event “aggressively disinvite” the only Jewish city council member when it comes to peace issues has something to do with antisemitism, adding that, “For me, Israel is a guarantee of [Jewish] survival, especially today.”

The Peace Conference is slated to take place in February. Munich city council politicians from the Green Party and the Social Democrats, who reject BDS, were not disinvited, raising additional questions about bias against Offman.

In 2017, Munich’s mainstream political parties, including the Christian Democratic Union, the Social Democratic Party and the Green Party passed a law that banned public funds and space for BDS. […]

The conference is slated to feature the controversial Islamic studies professor Katajun Amirpur, a German-Iranian writer who argued in an SZ article that former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad did not say he plans “to wipe Israel off the map.” Critics of the Iranian regime in Germany such as the German-Iranian public intellectual Nasrin Amirsedghi say that Amirpur downplays the Iranian threat toward Israel and the West.

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Belgium: Daily accuses Jewish lawmaker of spying for Israel

Via JTA:

The editor in chief of a Belgian daily newspaper accused a Jewish lawmaker of spying for Israel in parliament. Bart Eeckhout leveled the allegation against Michael Freilich in an op-ed titled “Anti-Semitism” that was published Saturday in the left-leaning De Morgen newspaper.

Eeckhout wrote that De Morgen has learned that Freilich’s parliamentary aide filmed several minutes of an exchange last month between Belgian lawmakers and representatives of pro-Palestinian nongovernmental organizations. Eeckhout claimed the footage was filmed in secret, but Freilich told the local media that the short videos were for sharing on social media. The De Morgen report on the matter did not say what the videos were used for or intended for. […]

“Was Mr. Freilich just adding to his private collection of movies of Israel critics, or was he collecting information for other interested parties, like Israel?” Eeckhout wrote. “The former would be amateuristic, the latter, however, smells like espionage.”

Eeckhout also wrote that “coincidentally,” criticism of “Israel’s government is equated with anti-Semitism.”

Earlier this year, Eeckhout defended a De Morgen columnist’s assertion, inaccurately attributed to a Jewish singer, about Jews having “ugly noses.” The op-ed, which accused Israel of stealing land and displaying a Jewish superiority complex, eventually was revised to omit the reference to ugly noses. [Belgian editor defends publication of column saying Jews have ‘ugly noses’]

Freilich told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that the espionage allegation “boggles the mind” and is “Dreyfus [mentality] on the eve of 2020.” Alfred Dreyfus was a French soldier who in 1894 was falsely convicted of treason because he was Jewish.

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Note:

For many years, Dyab Abou Jahjah, pictured below, was a columnist with the right-leaning daily De Standaard - Belgium: Newspaper fires columnist Abou Jahjah over praise of driver who killed Israeli soldiers.

Europe: Jews take their dignity and their lives into their hands publicly identifying as Jewish

Via Boston Herald:

On this Hanukkah, known as the Festival of Lights, a celebration of Jewish faith notwithstanding darkness, the painful fact of the matter is this: it doesn’t feel entirely safe to be Jewish because it is not, in fact, entirely safe to be Jewish. In Europe’s once-great capitals, Jews take not only take their dignity but their lives into their hands publicly identifying as Jewish.

This past Thursday, three teenagers in Berlin assaulted a 14-year old, taunting him with anti-Semitic slurs while choking him. This was in Berlin, of all places, Nazism’s seat, whose mayor recently rejected urgent appeals to cancel a conference supporting Hamas, which calls for Israel’s annihilation.

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Russia: Moscow’s trouble with Israelis has a deeper meaning

Via JNS:

Israel has long had a complicated relationship with Russia. As an ally of some of the Jewish state’s fiercest enemies, such as Iran and Syria, Jerusalem interacts with Moscow carefully and purposefully, walking a fine line to maintain warm ties. However, the recent imprisonment of Israeli-American Naama Issachar in Russia has brought the complex relationship between the two countries into the public eye.

A Russian court rejected Issachar’s appeal on Thursday to mitigate her sentence of seven-and-a-half years in prison on drug offenses after a small amount of marijuana was found in her luggage at a Moscow airport in April. On the same day, 15 Israelis disembarking their plane in Moscow were taken in for questioning by Russian authorities; a similar incident involving 40 Israelis occurred earlier this week. […]

The Syria arena has also created tensions between the two countries.

According to Aharonson, these cases are “surrounded by so many other things, such as the growing anger of the Russian military and security establishment towards Israel.”

For instance, after foreign-media reports emerged earlier this month that Israeli fighter planes carrying out a mission in Syria had to flee from Russian Su-35 planes, Russia came out in the media aggressively, stating that Israel used the airspace of Iraq and Jordan to carry out the mission. Since this was secret and not reported by Israeli media at the time, Russia’s tattling was perceived in Israel as revenge.

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Germany: Jewish leader says political parties infected with antisemitism

Via The Jerusalem Post:

The chairman of the Jewish community in Halle, Germany, where a neo-Nazi attempted to shoot up a synagogue on Yom Kippur, said that all German political parties are infected with Jew-hatred, according to a Sunday interview in the Bild paper.

“All parties are infected by the antisemitism virus," Max Privorozki, the head of the tiny Jewish community in Halle, told Bild in an eye-popping interview, adding: “I would not recommend to anyone to walk through Halle wearing a kippah.” […]

Members of other German political parties have come under fire in 2019 for supporting Iranian antisemites and allegedly mainstreaming Holocaust denial.

Some telling examples of antisemitism scandals over the last year, according to German media reports and critics, unfolded within the German Green Party and the Social Democratic Party.

The German Green Party was plunged into its most devastating antisemitism scandal in October, over its vice president’s mainstreaming of a senior Iranian politician who denies the Holocaust and seeks the destruction of the Jewish state. Green Party Bundestag Vice President Claudia Roth’s zealously greeted the speaker of Iran’s ersatz parliament, Ali Larijani a few weeks after Halle attack.

German Green Party MP, who signed on to an anti-Israel Green Party initiative to label Jewish products from the disputed territories in 2013, is on the board of the German-Palestinian Association—an organization that traffics in BDS and antisemitism.

Niels Annen, a state secretary in the Foreign Ministry and an MP for the Social Democratic Party, attended and defended a celebration of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s 40-year revolution at the Iranian Embassy in Germany in February. Iran’s regime is the leading state-sponsor of lethal antisemitism, Holocaust denial and terrorism.

A 2017 federal government study said 40% of Germans hold a modern antisemitic attitude, namely the intense loathing of the Jewish state. The study revealed that nearly 33 million Germans of 82 million are contaminated with contemporary antisemitism.

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National Police discover weapons cache of Nazi group in Valencia

Via Publico:

National Police arrested a man in Valencia who had a weapons cache, including guns and knives, as well as Nazi materials.  He is suspected of belonging to the "Combat 18" Nazi group.

Clip here

Germany: Schoolboy insulted in an antisemitic way, tied up and choked (update)

https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/international/europe/1577034398-germany-14-year-old-tied-up-choked-in-anti-semitic-attack Via Watch Antisemitism in Europe:

According to the police a 14-year-old boy from Berlin got harassed in school on Thursday. Three classmates insulted him in an antisemitic way, tied him up and choked him.

read more in German

More details @ i24NEWS:

A 14-year old was tied up and choked by three fellow students in a Berlin school in the Tempelhof-Schöneberg district on Thursday, according to a statement from the police. The statement alleges that the three showered the victim with anti-Semitic abuse during the attack.

The student survived the attack, with a physical education teacher said to have spotted the abuse and intervened.

When the victim was untied, the victim's throat was red, the police said, adding that the authorities have launched an investigation into the incident.

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France: Antisemitism, anti-Zionism only increasing says Israeli ambassador

Related:
France: 67% of French people indifferent to Jews leaving France

Via The Jerusalem Post:

Ambassador to France Aliza Bin-Noun has expressed concern with rising levels of antisemitism in France she has witnessed during her time as Israel’s senior diplomat in the country.

Speaking at a conference in Paris staged by the World Zionist Organization (WZO), Bin-Noun, who will soon end her four-year tenure as ambassador, said that “in the four years, I have seen how antisemitism and anti-Zionism have only increased.”

Bin-Noun noted that in 2018 there was an increase of 74%, but argued such figures were probably soft, since French Jews, she said, “have become accustomed to being harassed in the street” and having antisemitic slurs aimed at them and therefore do not report such incidents.

“I saw how the boundaries have been broken over time, things that would have once been taboo, and how people have felt comfortable to express themselves in these ways,” said the ambassador, noting expressions of antisemitism have become particularly bad on social media. [...]

There have been several complaints from French Jewry of a failure to prosecute antisemitic attacks of late, including a recent case in which a man who murdered Sarah Halimi, a Jewish woman living in Paris, was declared to be unfit for trial due to diminished mental capacity at the time of the attack, apparently due to having taken some form of cannabis before his attack.

Yaakov Hagoel, deputy chairman of the WZO, who initiated the conference, said “the goal of the haters of Israel” is to “lower the spirit” of the Jewish people, and cause it to turn its back on its Jewish and Zionist identity, “in order to destroy the continuity of the Jewish people.” 

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