The head of Austria’s Jewish community accused the far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ) on Thursday of failing to seriously tackle antisemitism in its ranks as a report showed cases of hostility to Jews to be on the rise nationally.

The comments follow Likud MK Yehuda Glick’s trip to Vienna on Monday, where he met with Austrian Vice Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache, who heads the far-right FPÖ.

“We are not an antisemitic party,” Harald Vilimsky, a member of the FPÖ and the European Parliament, told Glick. He added that he has had “very interesting meetings” with the Jewish community in Israel and New York. “What we try to do is to improve relations between our people and the Jewish people,” he said.

“The question is, how credible is that?” Oskar Deutsch, the head of Austria’s IKG Jewish umbrella organisation and EJC affiliate, told a news conference on Thursday. “You can’t go ‘click’ and say ‘Until now we’ve been like this but now we’re not antisemitic anymore, now we have other interests’. That is not credible.”

“Where have we heard many antisemitic statements from for decades? It didn’t begin with Haider – it was the case well before then. If it regularly comes from one political party, it is from FPÖ officials,” said Deutsch, whose organisation refuses to deal with FPÖ ministers.

The FPÖ says it has left its neo-Nazi past behind but its members are still regularly implicated in antisemitic scandals – most recently Udo Landbauer, who headed the FPÖ list in Lower Austria, the province that surrounds Vienna.