The European Jewish Congress has said that certain Jewish communities in Europe are in grave danger of antisemitic violence.
The EJC president has said small Jewish communities are being physically, verbally and psychologically threatened by fundamentalist elements.
Ynet has reported statements by Dr Moshe Kantor, president of the EJC, who has cited recent negative events concerning Jews.
He said that recently a respected and government-funded Catholic school, the College of the Sacred Heart, in Antwerp, had hosted a “Palestine Day,” replete with antisemitic references and activities for youngsters.
One stall at the event was titled: “Throw the soldiers into the sea” in which children were invited to throw replicas of Jewish and Israeli soldiers into two large tanks.
Last weekend, an event organized for Jewish children in Malmö was reportedly attacked by a gang of thugs who shouted “Heil Hitler” and “Jewish pigs”.
The gang even entered the area hosting the children’s event and damaged property.
Earlier in the year, after a surge of antisemitism hit the Malmö Jewish community, right-wing Malmö mayor, Ilmar Reepalu, said he thought the disruption to the children’s party had been “an understandable consequence of the Israel-Palestine conflict.”
Dr Kantor said in recent months, German former Bundesbank board member Thilo Sarrazin, the European Commissioner for Trade, Karel De Gucht, and Emilio Menendez del Valle, Spanish MEP, had all made antisemitic comments.
He said the comments from the three men had been extremely antisemitic and had been largely ignored by most officials in Europe.
He said because of this inaction, small Jewish communities, like Malmö, would teeter on the brink of extinction, threatened by “fundamentalist elements and their extreme left-wing cohorts on one side and the far-right neo-Nazis on the other.”
The EJC has called on European governments and the European Union to launch a campaign against intolerance and antisemitism, so to remind European citizens that the new Europe was established after the Second World War on the concept of “Never Again”.
