Violence against Jews up 40%
Anti-Semitic attacks increased 40% worldwide last year
The number of violent anti-Semitic attacks around the world surged nearly 40% last year, according to a report released Wednesday by researchers at Tel Aviv University in Israel.
The report found there were 766 recorded incidents against Jewish people in 2014 — the worst year for attacks since 2009.
It was released ahead of Israel’s commemoration of Holocaust Remembrance Day, which began Wednesday at sundown.
The attacks were “perpetrated with or without weapons and by arson, vandalism or direct threats against Jewish persons or institutions such as synagogues, community centers, schools, cemeteries and monuments as well as private property,” said the authors of the report, based at the Kantor Center at Tel Aviv University.
In 2013, there were 554 registered incidents.
“The overall feeling among many Jewish people is one of living in an intensifying anti-Jewish environment that has become not only insulting and threatening, but outright dangerous, and that they are facing an explosion of hatred toward them as individuals, their communities and Isra- el, as a Jewish state,” the study said.
In recent years, France has consistently seen the most reported cases of anti- Semitic violence worldwide, the report said. In January, four people were killed at a kosher supermarket during a terrorist attack in Paris.
Roger Cukierman, the president of Crif, a Paris-based group that represents Jewish-French organizations, told USA TODAY earlier this month that as incidences of anti- Semitic violence there have risen, Jewish people have been left pondering their future in the nation.
“If you are a father or mother and you bring your children to school that is like a fortress protected by police and the army with machine guns, you may have doubts about whether you want these kids to remain in such an environment,” Cukierman said, referring to security efforts by French authorities to protect its Jewish-French citizens after the Paris attacks.
France has the largest Jewish population outside of Israel and the United States, with about 475,000, or just over 3%, of the world’s Jewish population, according to the Jewish Virtual Library, an online resource.
That compares to about 5.7 million in the U.S. — home to 40% of the world’s Jews — and just over 6 million in Israel.
The report identified a number of different reasons for the spike in attacks last year, including the conflict in Gaza last summer between Hamas and Israel, as well as a “general climate of hatred and violence” that has accompanied the sudden rise of Islamic State militants in Syria and Iraq.
The attacks in Paris were not counted as part of the report because they occurred this year.
A separate study released this week in Israel found that children of Holocaust survivors are more likely to fear the threat of Iran developing a nuclear weapon than children of parents not directly affected by the Holocaust.