Annika Hernroth-Rothstein @ Israel Hayom:
Next week, on the night between November 9 and 10, the Workers' Party in the northern Swedish city of Umeå is arranging a rally in memory of Kristallnacht. Although this sounds like an honorable and well-meaning initiative, it has been met by a fair amount of criticism and pushback from media outlets and members of the Jewish community.
The organizers of the event "Umeå against Nazism" have chosen not to invite Umeå's Jewish community, nor will any Jewish speakers appear at the event. When members of that community contacted the main organizer, Jan Hägglund, a member of Umeå's local council for the Workers' Party, they were told that Jews had been excluded from the memorial because "they might perceive it as an unwelcoming or even unsafe situation."
"In previous years, we have had a lot of Palestinian flags at these rallies, and even one banner where the Israeli flag was equated with a swastika. The Jewish community wasn't invited because we assumed they might be uncomfortable around that sort of thing."
Beyond that, the Facebook page promoting the event has also made sure the Jews are far from front and center on November 9, but chooses instead to highlight the issue of immigration and racism in general, making the pogroms against Jews a mere afterthought.
The organizers of a Kristallnacht-memorial in the town of Uppsala are guilty of a similar "oversight" as they advertise the event "Commemoration of Kristallnacht" without mentioning Jews or synagogues even once. Their description of Kristallnacht reads: "On the night between November 9 and 10 in 1938, 91 people were killed, 3,000 people were sent to concentration camps and 1,000 temples were destroyed." Just like that, Jews are turned into random people and synagogues are miscellaneous temples, diluting the memory they claim to want to honor. more
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