Survey Shows European Jews Report Rise in Anti-Semitism On Eve of Kristallnacht Anniversary

Tomorrow will mark the 75th
anniversary of the pogrom against Jews that took place across Nazi
Germany as well as parts of Austria known as
Kristallnacht. 

Ahead of the anniversary, the European Union’s
Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA) has released
a survey on anti-semitism, which shows that Jews in Europe
feel that there has been an increase in anti-semitism in the past
five years.

From the FRA Survey:            
                 

Two thirds of the survey respondents (66 %) consider
antisemitism to be a problem across the eight EU Member States
surveyed, while on average three quarters of the respondents (76 %)
also believe that the situation has become more acute and that
antisemitism has increased in the country where they live over the
past five years. In the 12 months following the survey, close to
half of the respondents (46 %) worry about being verbally insulted
or harassed in a public place because they are Jewish, and one
third (33 %) worry about being physically attacked in the country
where they live because they are Jewish. Furthermore, 66 % of
parents or grandparents of school-aged children worry that their
children could be subjected to antisemitic verbal insults or
harassment at school or en route, and 52 % worry that they would be
physically attacked with an antisemitic motive while at school or
en route. In the past 12 months, over half of all survey
respondents (57 %) heard or saw someone claim that the Holocaust
was a myth or that it has been exaggerated.

According to the survey, almost a third of Jews in the eight
countries examined in the survey (where more than 90 percent of
European Jews live) have considered emigrating in the last five
years. The figure is especially high in Hungary, where almost half
of the Jews surveyed said that they have considered leaving.
Jobbik, Hungary’s anti-semitic and anti-Roma party, is the third most
popular party in the country.

While much of Europe’s anti-semitism continues to be based in
sort of nationalism and prejudices seen before the beginning of the
Second World War,
The New York Times’ reporting on the survey
points out that some of Europe’s more recent anti-semitism is
rooted in the political left and the comparatively recent
Muslim communities in Europe:

In other countries, however, hostility to Jews is now rooted
more on the left and in Muslim immigrant communities, the survey’s
findings indicate. More than three-quarters of respondents in
France and Belgium, both of which have large populations of Muslim
immigrants, identified anti-Semitism as a problem. Eighty percent
of respondents in these same two countries described immigration as
a problem, too, suggesting tense relations between Jewish
communities and recently arrived immigrants.

About 90 percent of respondents in Belgium and France reported
that the Arab-Israeli conflict had had a “notable impact” on the
safety of Jews. Only 40 percent reported the same in Hungary, which
has few Muslim immigrants, while a majority of respondents in most
other countries surveyed said tensions in the Middle East had
affected their feelings of safety either a “great deal” or a “fair
amount.”

Read the full report below: