Europe’s Jews worry as antisemitism rises over war
GENEVA — As he sits in Geneva, Michel Dreifuss does not feel all that far away from the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel on Oct. 7 and Israel’s subsequent retaliatory bombardment of Gaza.
The ripples are rolling through Europe and upending assumptions both global and intimate — including those about his personal safety as a Jew.
“Yesterday I bought a tear-gas spray canister at a military-equipment surplus store,” the 64-year-old retired tech sector worker said recently at a rally to mark a month since the Hamas terrorist killings. The choice, he says, is a “precaution,” driven by a surge of antisemitism in Europe.
Last month’s slayings of about 1,200 people in Israel by armed Palestinian terrorists represented the biggest killing of Jews since the Holocaust. The fallout from it has shaken a continent all too familiar with deadly anti-jewish hatred for centuries.
The past century is of particular note, of course. Concern about rising antisemitism in Europe is fueled in part by what happened to Jews before and during World War II.
What most chills many Jews interviewed is what they see as the lack of empathy for the Israelis killed during the early morning massacre and for the relatives of the hostages suspended in an agonizing limbo.
“What really upsets me,” said Holocaust survivor Herbert Traube said at a Paris event commemorating the 85th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the 1938 government-backed pogroms against Jews in Germany and Austria, “is to see that there isn’t a massive popular reaction against this.”
The list of examples of anti-jewish sentiment since the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attacks is long and documented by governments and watchdog groups across Europe.
■ Little more than a month after the attack in Israel, the French Interior Ministry said 1,247 antisemitic incidents had been reported since Oct. 7, nearly three times the total for all of 2022.
■ Denmark’s main Jewish association said cases were up 24 times from the average of the last nine months.
■ The Community Security Trust, which tracks antisemitic incidents in Britain, reported more than 1,000 such events — the most ever recorded for a 28-day period.
That all comes despite widespread denunciations of anti-jewish hatred — and support for Israel — from leaders in Europe since the attack.
“Some of us are in a state of panic,” said Anna Segal, 37, the manager of the Kahal Adass Jisroel in Berlin, a community of 450 members.
Some community members are changing how they live, Segal said. Students no longer wear uniforms. Kindergarten classes don’t leave the building for field trips or the playground next door. Some members no longer call taxis, or they hesitate to order deliveries to their homes. Hebrew-speaking in public is fading. Some wonder if they should move to Israel.
“I hear more and more from people from the Jewish community who say they feel safer and more comfortable in Israel now than in Germany, despite the war and all the rockets,” Segal said. “Because they don’t have to hide there.”