In Western Europe, Jews feel threatened, and Eastern Europe offers much more security
November 20, 2024 In 2025, the writer Adam Lebor plans to publish the book "The Last Days of Budapest" - a documentary narrative about the life of the city during the Holocaust. This is written by The Wall Street Journal journalist Boyan Panchevsky.
Lebor, who lives between Budapest and London, notes that "in the memory of the living today" such cities of Eastern Europe as Budapest and Prague have become a "cemetery for Jews". Today, according to him, these are "the two safest places in Europe for Jews".
Anti-Semitic prejudices, of course, also exist in Eastern Europe, but the region does not see such violence against Jews as can be observed today in Amsterdam, Paris, Berlin and other cities in Western Europe. The main reason for this difference is that the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands and Germany serve as home to large Muslim communities that identify themselves with the struggle of Palestinians, while Hungary and the Czech Republic have largely closed their borders to Muslim immigrants.
In October, the European Commission reported that "conflicts in the Middle East have led to an unprecedented level of anti-Semitism since the founding of the European Union".
In Berlin, Paris and Brussels, Jewish facilities are guarded by armed police around the clock. Government officials and community leaders warn Jews to hide their Jewishness in public to avoid an attack on the street.
Recently, in Amsterdam, a crowd chased and beat visiting Israeli football fans. A few days later, the Belgian police arrested six people on suspicion of conspiracy to attack Jews in Antwerp, where a large Orthodox community lives. In Berlin, the teenage team of the Jewish football club Maccabi Berlin was attacked by unknown persons armed with knives and batons during the match.
On November 14, the French authorities sent more than 5,500 police and security guards to Paris for a football match between Israel and France, allowing only about 20 thousand spectators. Despite unprecedented security measures, there was a small fight during the game, some visitors carried smoke bombs that were activated during the performance of the Israeli national anthem.
Statistics show that anti-Jewish violence has been increasing in Western Europe over the past decade, but it has increased sharply since Hamas' attack on Israel on October 7, 2023 and Israel's retaliatory invasion of Gaza.
In France, the number of anti-Semitic incidents increased from 436 in 2022 to 1676 in 2023, while the number of attacks, including stabbings, almost doubled from 43 to 85.
Anti-Semitic incidents in the UK increased from 1,662 to 4103, and the number of attacks increased from 136 to 266. According to the Institute of Jewish Political Studies, a British non-profit organization, only a small part of such incidents are reported to the police or public organizations.
"This is what the globalized intifada looks like," says Jonathan Greenblatt, executive director of the Anti-Defamation League. In November, Greenblatt went to the Netherlands and Germany to discuss attacks with high-ranking politicians. "Anti-Semitism begins with Jews, but never ends with Jews," he notes, warning that violent upheavals can absorb these societies.
After the attack in Amsterdam, a delegation of imams from France and Belgium came to the city to condemn the violence and lay flowers at the house where Anne Frank was hiding during the Nazi occupation before she was found and deported to the death camp. At the same time, some local Islamic organizations criticized the media and a number of politicians for using an attack on Jews to stigmatize Muslims.
Public opinion polls conducted by the Anti-Defamation League showed that anti-Semitic sentiments are actually more common in Eastern European countries such as Hungary, Poland and Ukraine than in France, Germany and the Netherlands. Nevertheless, Eastern Europe, where the "death fields" of the Holocaust are located, reports only a small number of violent anti-Semitic incidents after October 7. Hungary and Poland, where about 45 thousand and 17 thousand Jews live, respectively, registered only one violent incident each. Two incidents were recorded in the Czech Republic, where about 5,000 Jews live.
"There is now a huge difference between the West, on the one hand, and Central and Eastern Europe, which is definitely a safer place for Jews today," says Agnieszka Markewicz, director of the Warsaw Central European Office of the American Jewish Committee. Although Jews in Central and Eastern Europe face online hatred, they are not in physical danger, she claims.
Most European Jews are difficult to identify. The most likely target of violence are Orthodox believers dressed in traditional Jewish clothes or people who speak Hebrew. The Israeli government considers Great Britain, France and Germany "very risky" for Israelis traveling abroad.
In January 2024, in London, a group of two men and two Israeli women who spoke Hebrew to each other were attacked by three men of Arab or North African origin: they threw glass bottles at them and then hit one of the women on the neck.
The head of the Central Council of Jews, the largest Jewish organization in Germany, Josef Schuster, said that Western Europe is experiencing a surge in anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic violence. If in the past anti-Semitic violence came from the ultra-right, he notes, now it comes mostly from left-wing extremists and Islamists: "Israel's conflicts with Hamas, Hezbollah or Iran seem to irritate migrant communities."
According to an official EU survey conducted in 2023 before Hamas attacks, 50% of victims of anti-Semitic attacks in the EU reported that the attackers had Islamist and extremist views: in 2018, there were 30% of them. Another 22% then had left-wing extremist views, and 17% had right-wing extremist views.
About 10% of the 68 million inhabitants of France are Muslims, the Jewish population here is 400 thousand people, and this is the largest figure in Europe.
According to a survey conducted in December 2023, 45% of French Muslims perceived Hamas' attack on Israel on October 7 as an "act of resistance to colonization", almost every fifth expressed sympathy for him. In the same poll, 90% of the total French population described Hamas as "war criminals" related to "terrorist acts".
According to the 2022 survey, more than a third of Germans held anti-Semitic views, but among Muslims in the country this proportion is twice as high.
In 2023, 148 violent anti-Semitic crimes were committed in Germany, which is almost twice as much as a year earlier: then there were 88 of them.
According to a recent EU survey, more than half of German Jews have considered emigrating in the last five years for reasons related to their Jewishness. In recent years, tens of thousands of Jews have emigrated from France and Belgium to Israel.
On the contrary, the Jewish community of Poland has doubled in five years. In the Czech Republic, which the EU study considers one of the least anti-Semitic countries in Europe, only 18% of Jews consider the possibility of emigration.
"There is no anti-Semitic violence in Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic... Here anti-Semitism is limited verbally, and it is more aggressive in online discourse, but does not take action," says Anya Zelinska from the Polish Jewish association Czulent, which collects data on anti-Semitism.
"The Czech Republic is much safer for Jews in terms of anti-Semitic violence than Western Europe," says Petr Papušek, President of the Federation of Jewish Communities of the Czech Republic. The perpetrators of anti-Jewish violence in Western Europe are mainly from migrant communities, he notes: "However, the Czech Republic is only a transit country in terms of migration, the Arab and/or Muslim community is very small here."
According to Papushka, the main driving forces of anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli activities are foreign students coming on exchange, mainly from Western Europe and the United States, as well as ultra-left activists in scientific circles.
Yvonne Penkavova, co-founder of Jewish Prague Tours, a travel agency that organizes tours to the Jewish quarters of the capital, says that it is somewhat surreal to see Jewish life flourishing here while it is subjected to such attacks in neighboring countries: "It is absolutely terrible to watch footage of real physical violence from Amsterdam and other places. As a woman and as a Jew, I don't feel safe on the streets of Paris and Berlin, and I don't want to go to places where my pendant with Magendovid can cause me trouble. It was a big mistake not to focus on the integration of immigrant communities in the West."
Chief Rabbi of the Netherlands, Binyomin Jacobs, says that he stopped using public transport 15 years ago after the police warned him about security threats from Muslim youth. His house is equipped with a special security system, including video surveillance installed by the police.
The security situation in Western Europe is much worse than in the East, says Jacobs. During a recent trip to Budapest, he enjoyed the opportunity to move without the protection of the police, which he needs in the Netherlands.
"The windows of my house were broken, and Muslim children shouted on the street: "yahud", which means "Jew" in Arabic. There is nothing like that in Budapest, no danger."
According to Jacobs, within a week after the recent act of violence in Amsterdam, he received ten requests for confirmation of the Jewishness that Jews need to move to Israel.
"I usually get ten requests a year," he says. "The Jews have packed their bags and are ready to go."
"We watch reports on terrible violence in Amsterdam and other places and now we feel much happier than the Jews of Western Europe," says Tamas Vero, who was a rabbi in Budapest for 25 years. "You can hear Hebrew on the streets of Budapest, you can see how Orthodox Jews live their lives here in peace and harmony."
Vera belongs to the neologues, a moderate branch of Judaism, close to conservative Judaism. The reason for the current situation, in his opinion, is that "our government closed the borders to mass immigration, and looking back, it saved us Jews".