The European Jewish Association is proud and delighted to welcome another organisation to our growing roster of partners and communities.
We have just concluded and signed a memorandum of understanding with The Warsaw Ghetto Museum.
We are sure that this cooperation will bring with it beautiful and important accomplishments. We look forward to working for the betterment of Polish and European Jewry together.
After the recent terrorist murders of Jews in France, Belgium and Denmark, other Western European governments are beginning to understand that it is their legal and moral duty to protect the institutions of their Jewish minority.
Yet on this issue, Switzerland lags far behind other countries. This is particularly worrying in light of the deadly shooting in 2001 in a Zurich street, where an Israeli rabbi (recognizable as a Jew by his clothing) was murdered. The case has never been solved.
Switzerland has a population of 8.4 million; less than 18,000 are Jews.
The largest Jewish organization is the nominally orthodox Federation of Jewish communities (SIG). It has, at most, 12,000 members. Assessments by Swiss intelligence agencies and police over the past two years have shown that there are substantial threats against Jewish institutions there.
Because Switzerland is a federal state, it is sometimes unclear when security is the responsibility of the national government, the canton (province), or the municipality in which an institution is located. Overall, Jewish community security costs are estimated to be from $5 -7 million dollars a year, a large amount for such a small group.
The discussion on who is responsible for security (and paying for it) has been going on for several years. Only in October 2017 did the Swiss government admit for the first time that it has a duty to protect the Jewish minority –without saying how it would provide or pay for this security.
At the end of 2016, for example, it was scandalously suggested that Jews should create a fund with their own money in order to take care of their security. Some funds have been made available for one Jewish community in Zurich by the cantonthough these are not destined for security. For the other communities and synagogues in the town, no funds are provided.
The situation is particularly problematic in the third largest — and 212 year old — Jewish community of Basel, which faces a huge deficit and ultimately perhaps bankruptcy. It currently has the choice between reducing activities or having less security. First the government of the canton — and then the parliament (Grosser Rat) — voted down subsidizing security measures. The parliament has also refused to increase financing of the police force, despite the general terror threat in Europe and Switzerland.
But after the lethal Christmas market attack by a Muslim terrorist in Berlin in December 2016, measures were taken in Switzerland last year to protect Christmas markets. A heavily armed police presence was introduced, and several Christmas markets were fortified. Funding for these security measures was provided by the state.
One might recall some other elements of the unfriendly past attitudes of Switzerland to its Jews.
Switzerland only reluctantly granted its Jews full emancipation under US and French economic pressure. Switzerland was also the first European country to outlaw Jewish ritual slaughter in 1894; this was part of a desire to stop Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe.
During the Second World War, some of the Jews who fled from the Nazis were allowed in, but many others were returned to Nazi-occupied countries, where they faced lethal risks. After the war, a concentrated effort was made to force almost all of the 22,500 refugee Jews in the country to leave.
In the 1990s, it became known that Swiss banks had been systematically stalling efforts of Holocaust survivors to obtain money that their murdered relatives had placed there. In 1997, a case where a leading Swiss bank was caught destroying documents on dormant Jewish accounts shook the country to the core.
Ultimately the World Jewish Congress brought two American political adversaries together — US President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, and New York Republican Senator Al D’Amato. They took an interest in the dormant bank accounts issue, which led to pressure on Switzerland.
A commission led by the former Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, Paul Volcker, investigated the dormant bank accounts issue. One scandal it discovered was that the deposits in many such accounts had been eaten away by annual bank fees and service charges — or had simply been transferred to the banks’ profits.
The then-president of Switzerland, Jean-Pascal Delamuraz, claimed that Jewish organizations were trying to “blackmail Switzerland into paying them large sums of money to destabilize Switzerland and destroy its banking industry.” This made the scandal even bigger. His apology was considered insufficient.
In recent months, several American Jewish organizations and even US politicians have started to take an interest in Switzerland’s discriminatory attitude toward the security of Jewish institutions. If the Swiss authorities do not act in the near future in a substantial way on this issue, they may risk yet another scandal abroad.
But it would be far worse if a terrorist attack on a Jewish institution would happen before then.
The article was published in The Algemeiner
(May 15, 2023 / JNS) Jews from across Europe gathered to address the continent’s growing antisemitism problem at the European Jewish Association’s annual conference in Porto, Portugal, on Monday.
“We are one community undivided by borders. When we speak with one voice, we are stronger together,” said EJA Chairman Rabbi Menachem Margolin.
“As we meet, governments across Europe are coming forward with plans affecting Jewish life in Europe. We must ask ourselves what kind of future we want to see. And what part all of us can do to make that vision a reality,” Margolin added.
The two-day conference, “Shaping the Future of European Jewry Together,” includes panel discussions on various countries’ national plans for combating antisemitism, the challenge of fighting online hate, and a new campus leadership program sponsored by EJA.
“Antisemitism is on the rise and unfortunately, Jewish institutions across the continent are required to invest more and more in security,” said European Commission Vice President Margaritis Schinas.
“The data show that approximately 38% of the Jews in Europe are considering leaving Europe because they feel unsafe. This is a shame and it’s the responsibility of every government in the E.U. to protect its Jewish citizens,” he said, adding that 19 E.U. governments have released national action plans to combat antisemitism.
The conference proposed a motion calling for antisemitism to be separated from other forms of hate and urging other Jewish groups to reject “intersectionality,” a theoretical framework that separates groups into “oppressed” and “privileged.”
“Antisemitism is unique and must be treated as such,” according to the motion, which notes that unlike other hatreds, it is “state-sanctioned in many countries,” “given cover by the United Nations” and denied to be racism by other groups targeted by hatred.
“There is little to no solidarity or empathy towards Jewish communities from other groups affected by hate when antisemitic atrocities occur or when Israelis are murdered in terrorist acts,” the motion notes.
“As years go by after the Holocaust, some social and political movements in Europe may want to forget it and say that antisemitism is just another kind of hatred, nothing unique about it. This is a dangerous attitude for the future of the Jewish community in Europe,” said Rabbi Slomó Köves, president of EMIH (The Association of Hungarian Jewish Communities).
“Antisemitism … requires separate attention and action from other forms of prejudice. While we stand in solidarity with all those who fight against hate, we cannot allow our struggle against antisemitism to be subsumed within broader ‘intersectional’ movements that fail to acknowledge the unique and specific nature of anti-Jewish bias or reject our connection to Zionism,” he said.
Gabriel Senderowicz, president of the Jewish Community of Oporto, said, “Many European governments confuse Jewish life with Jewish heritage. They think of Judaism as ancient houses that have been rehabilitated and some municipal museums that open on Shabbat.
“I am honored to be president of a community that has synagogues that respect traditional Judaism, that has kosher restaurants, films of history, a Jewish museum closed on Shabbat, and a Holocaust Museum that welcomes 50,000 children a year and teaches them that the aim of the Final Solution was to exterminate the Jews and not minorities in general,” Senderowicz said.
Amichai Chikli, Israel’s minister of Diaspora affairs and combating antisemitism, said in a video message that Israel’s government is troubled by trends in Europe, citing the plan of the European Students Union to “embrace the BDS movement.” He noted that the move would make life difficult for Jewish students on European campuses.
“Against these threats and many more, we will have to work together, determined and wisely,” Chikli said.
https://www.jns.org/rising-antisemitism-focus-at-european-jewish-association-conference/
It’s a challenging time for Jewish communities in Europe. Anti-Semitism is on the rise as populism and the politics of the lowest common denominator are gaining traction. Our communities often need round the clock protection and our practices and customs such as keeping Kosher are under pressure from increasing political interference.
