A prominent rabbi from Brussels on Monday called on the European Union to declare a six-month emergency period for fighting antisemitism at anti-Israel protests and beyond. He warned that Jews would leave Europe in the absence of such action.
Rabbi Menachem Margolin, director of the Brussels-based European Jewish Association, issued the call in a speech he made in Krakow, Poland, to about 100 participants of a conference commemorating the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the nearby Auschwitz German death camp.
“The European Jewish Association calls on the European Union and its member states to declare a six-month emergency period to combat period, with high-level protection for Jewish communities but also special measures at public events,” said Margolin.
Such events have become “a fanfare where anything goes and anything can be said and done,” he said.
Organizers of protests under the plan would need to “sign an obligation” against speech that incites violence and face rigorous monitoring for such conduct and heavy punishments, said Margolin.
“If our call today won’t be answered, we will start to see an exodus of Jews from Europe and the end of Jewish life on this continent, and Europe will lose an important part of its history and rich culture,” he said.
‘Worst it’s been since Kristallnacht’
The conference at a hotel on the outskirts of Krakow was advertised on large, jarring banners featuring a photograph of graffiti documented in London this year that read: “Kill a Jew.”
Amichai Chikli, Israel’s minister of Diaspora affairs and combating antisemitism, addressed the conference via a video message. The “slogan ‘Never again’ seems to be fading away amid countless attacks on Jews, especially in Britain, the Netherlands, Germany and France,” he said.
The conference, held ahead of the annual EJA Delegation to Auschwitz, was attended by top politicians and Jewish community leaders from across the continent. The EJA showed a film that began with archive footage of buildings burning in Germany during the Kristallnacht pogroms of 1938. This was followed by a string of videos from a series of assaults by Arabs against Israelis in Amsterdam on Nov. 7 following a soccer match between Maccabi Tel Aviv and the Ajax team.
The pogrom in Amsterdam “reminded us of pictures we wanted to forget and that we thought we’d never see again,” Chikli said.
“The situation is the worst it’s been since Kristallnacht,” Margolin said. “As we prepare to visit Auschwitz, where 6 million Jews were murdered, we do so sadly knowing that Europe is walking down the same path.”
Budapest Mayor Gergely Szilveszter Karácsony spoke at the conference about the complicity of Hungarians in the Holocaust, a controversial issue in his country. “Although the accepted history is that Nazis killed the Jews in the Holocaust, in Hungary this is not true. The Hungarian state was responsible,” he said. Today, he added, Budapest is “one of the safest places in Europe for Jews.”
Christer Mattsson, a lecturer and expert on radicalization and antisemitism from the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, spoke about anti-Zionism as a modern reincarnation of traditional antisemitism.
“When the nation was the ultimate good, the Jew was a cosmopolitan,” he said. “Today, when human rights are the ultimate good, Israel becomes the ultimate antithesis. This is Israelification of antisemitism, where Israel serves as the collective global Jew.”
Mattsson noted how in traditional Christian antisemitism, some baptized Jews who’d converted to Christianity were presented as role models for others. The same dynamic, he argued, is on display in anti-Israel circles and propaganda, where “token Jews, good Jews, who are anti-Israel, are presented as acceptable.
“This is stated openly: The only real Jew is an anti-Zionist Jew, an idea often placed prominently at these events,” he said.
