Organizers of a Jewish film festival in Malmö, Sweden, postponed the event indefinitely after none of the venues they contacted agreed to host it, a leader from the city’s Jewish community said on Sunday.
Several venues cited security concerns, “even though we’ve had a string of events this year that went without incident in celebration of 250 years of Jewish presence in Malmö,” Fredrik Sieradzki, who heads the Jewish Learning Centre in the city, told JNS.
Ola Tedin, initiator of JIFF, the Jewish International Film Festival, told the SVT broadcaster that among the venues that declined to host the festival was the Panora cinema, which is run by a nonprofit cultural association and receives municipal subsidies. Panora cited previous engagement and workload issues in refusing to host the Jewish event, SVT reported.
“No cinema wants to participate,” Tedin told SVT. “A couple of them refer to security reasons. They are worried that something will happen.”
The Filmstaden theater confirmed to SVT that it had decided to turn down the JIFF’s request. “It was not an easy decision, but we prioritize the safety of our employees,” said Irene Hernberg, PR manager at Filmstaden Norden.
Reports in the media in Sweden about the JIFF’s failure to secure a venue prompted condemnations by politicians from across the spectrum.
Culture Minister Parisa Liljestrand of the center-right Moderate Party told SVT: “That one of our national minorities feels so vulnerable, and that organizers perceive that they cannot arrange content and culture with Jewish content, it is an absolute disaster for society.”
John Roslund, a local politician for the right-wing Sweden Democrats party, wrote in a press release that the situation is “bizarre” and that the municipality should step in and provide a suitable location.
The municipality has been generally attentive to the needs of the Jewish community, Sieradzki told JNS.
Simona Mohamsson, the leader of the center-right Liberals party, wrote on X that “Jewish hatred is being normalized in Malmö.”
Members of Malmö’s dwindling Jewish community, which has several hundred members, have experienced extreme expressions of anti-Israel sentiment and antisemitism in the city in recent years. Malmö has roughly 350,000 residents, and Muslims account for about a third of the population, according to official estimates.
Malmö’s antisemitism problem was exposed internationally for the first time in 2009, when protests over Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza turned into antisemitic violence triggered by the attendance of Israeli athletes at a tennis match. That January, the local Jewish cemetery was firebombed.
In November 2023, a demonstrator burned an Israeli flag outside the only synagogue in Malmö as about a dozen other protesters chanted “Bomb Israel” while waving Palestinian flags.
Last year, two Swedish converts to Islam were arrested by Stockholm’s SÄPO security agency for planning to attack synagogues and other Jewish targets on behalf of the Islamic State.
