An altercation in Stockholm, Sweden on Sunday reported on in Israel and elsewhere as an antisemitic incident during a commemoration event for the 1938 Nazi Kristallnacht pogroms really wasn’t, the head of Sweden’s Jewish community told JNS on Monday.
The reports are “not really true,” said Aron Verständig, the president of the Council of Swedish Jewish Communities.
According to Verständig, a non-Jewish, transgender activist holding an Israeli flag had confronted anti-Israel protesters during one of their rallies. The anti-Israel protesters took the flag and threw it into a canal. The incident was unrelated to any Kristallnacht commemoration, he said.
The incident in Sweden followed a pre-planned mass assault on Israeli soccer fans in Amsterdam on the night of Nov. 7. Separately, players for the Jewish TuS Makkabi soccer team were reportedly assaulted on Thursday following a game against DJK Schwarz-Weiß Neukölln in Berlin, Germany.
The assaults in Amsterdam, which left some 25 Israelis injured and which prominent politicians in Israel and the Netherlands condemned as a pogrom, focused international attention on Europe’s antisemitism problem in general and its growth among Muslim immigrants and their descendants.
In the wake of the Amsterdam attacks, Israel’s National Security Council issued a travel alert, warning that anti-Israel groups have called to harm Israelis and Jews elsewhere in Europe.
