The relentless efforts of Katharina von Schnurbein, European Commission coordinator on combating antisemitism have generated headlines and drawn considerable attention to the problem that she was appointed to fight, amplifying its footprint in the media and government.
“Because we are looking into it, it is more visible,” she said during an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency during the inaugural international meeting of special envoys and coordinators combating antisemitism.
Indeed, some of the most shocking headlines about antisemitism in Europe since 2015 came from work promoted by von Schnurbein, who began working at the European Union in 2002 as a press officer.
One of the headlines came from a groundbreaking EU survey of more than 16,000 European Jews. About a third of the Jews polled in 12 countries said they avoid Jewish events or places out of fear for their safety. A similar number said they have considered emigrating in the past five years because they did not feel safe as Jews.
Von Schnurbein, 45, a soft-spoken mother of four originally from the German state of Bavaria, does not claim that rising antisemitism is merely a perception fed by her efforts.
“I believe in fact-based policy, and the facts are worrisome,” said von Schnurbein, referencing increases in documented antisemitic incidents in 2018 in her native Germany (19 percent over 2017), the United Kingdom (16%), France (74%) and the Netherlands (19%).
Yet those figures are not von Schnurbein’s benchmark for success, as they often reflect fluctuations in the victims’ willingness to report incidents, as well as major flaws and differences in how individual countries collect and classify data.
Rather she takes into account how European Jews perceive their reality.
“Our ultimate aim must be to ensure that when we hold another survey in five or six years among Jewish populations in Europe, we’ll see changes in the trends of how Jews feel: more secure, that they see their future above all in Europe, feel they can actually live the way they want, free to express their identity — including support for Israel — without feeling afraid to say it.”