Passover 7 days of meditation opening a way to conversion

Immanuel Verbondskind looks back at the lockdown period and the impact on the small Jeshuaist community and some Jewish communities. For Jews it has even been more difficult to undergo the lockdown, because many do have no television or internet and have been in a real-time strict isolation, not being able to have worship moments with brethren and sisters.

Those times of seclusion and restriction could be called a ‘reflection time‘ or retreat, where one had enough time to think about faith and religion. On the 15th of April this year (2022) it was 14 Nisan, the evening to remember the liberation of God’s People from the enslavement in Egypt, but also to remember the gathering of Jeshua and his disciples, where at the last supper Jesus talked about the blood being shed for the liberation of all people.

In Wintertime, many Christians celebrate Christmas and have some holiday, where they also can think about the light that came in the darkness. For true Christians and for Jews, 14-22 Nisan is the most sacred period of the religious year, where is remembered how the Elohim brought to light in the dark night by passing over the houses where there was the blood of the lamb, giving the opportunity for the Jews to flee their world of slavery in Egypt.

True Christians with Jeshuaists remember also the Passover lamb Jeshua (Jesus Christ) and show their gratitude for the salvation by the Grace of God, Him accepting that ransom Jesus was willing to pay for all people.

 

Since Friday night Jeshuaists and Christadelphians, like other true Christians, since some long time of isolation because of lockdown, could at some places get together (in restricted form) and make connections with other brothers and sisters, either in place or via the internet streaming. Many, the previous time in isolation got lots of opportunities to think about the value of such a connection or ‘fraternity‘. They had enough time in the lockdown period to think about their religious affiliation, and some also about their need to go over into a conversion. Because the last few months, more signs could be seen that we are entering a new period in the Time of Ages or in God’s Plan.

Because of those “Signs of the Times” there has come a certain pressure to know what to do and which direction to go. Now many more ask themselves who shall be part of the things going to be there after the big battle or great tribullation.

Several people have wondered in those Covid times if it would not be better to become part of a community. There also have been Jews by race or non-believing and non-practising Jews, who started to change ideas about the world and its Creator. The Jews from Middle European origin also started wondering by which denomination of Jews they would best join. Those people living here in Belgium, France, Holland and Germany wonder if they would convert to Judaism, if they then would be accepted as a Jew.

Anti-Zionists often claim that Ashkenazi Jews are white imposters, fake Jews who are entirely descended from European converts to Judaism. This is completely rebutted by genetic studies which have proven a Middle Eastern patrilineal origin for Ashkenazi Jewry. However, when the Anti-Zionists make the Apartheid accusation are Jews suddenly a single racial group. The notion that Jews generally constitute a racial group is Nazi in origin and is at the core of the Anti-Jewish Apartheid libel. {Why Many Ashkenazi Jews “Look” European}

There is a long history of the racialization of Jews. There have also been religious and non-religious Jews in several countries.

Racialization of Jews have a long pedigree in the history of Anti-Semitism. Racialization of Jews was practiced in Spain against the Anusim (“Marranos”), Jews who were involuntarily converted to Christianity during the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. Racialization of Jews in Germany became prominent already in the second half of the 19th century when religious Anti-Semitism (Anti-Judaism) was increasingly supplanted by racializing Anti-Semitism. The third phase is the current racialization of Jews by the extreme left.

Racialization of Jews is intended to paint Jews as “genetic aliens” in a certain country (e.g. Spain, Germany or Israel). Of course painting any other people as “genetic aliens” is not socially acceptable beyond Nazi circles. But Anti-Semitic opponents of Israel systematically engage in discourse to stigmatize the Jews in the land of Israel as genetic aliens despite Ashkenazim, Sephardim and Mizrahim patrilineally being very very genetically similar to Palestinians due to common historical origin, with the genetic divergence accounted for by historical conversions to Judaism and by immigration to the land of Israel from other parts of the Middle East during the Islamic era.

Ashkenazim, Sephardim and Mizrahim are more similar to each other than to any other populations and are predominantly of Middle Eastern origin in genetically confirming the historical narrative of ancient Israelite origin. The Anti-Semitic accusation according to which Ashkenazi Jews are exclusively descended from European converts to Judaism despite that part of Ashkenazi ancestry accounting only for only 30% of the Ashkenazi gene pool with the remaining 70% being Middle Eastern in origin is used by Anti-Semites such as Palestinian-American professor of Columbia University Joseph Massad to libelously paint Israeli Jews as “European colonizers” and against the scientific consensus denying that most modern Israeli Jews are Levantine returnees to Israel. The false claim that Ashkenazi Jews are “European colonizers” is in fact one of the main claims involved in the Anti-Semitic racialization of Ashkenazi Jewry. {Jews are a Nation of Color}

After the covid pandemic several feel a greater need to come to connect with one or another Jewish or Jeshuaist denomination. Having been on their own, in their own living room, with nobody else to share the faith, was too lonely. Some, who were previously connected with a shul, lost contact but also interest to go to a prayer and study house. Though others have now, even more than ever before, felt the need to be connected to other fellow believers.

This Passover is for several an essential time to consider the way how God handled His People and how, also today, He is still willing to guide them through the desert of this (non-religious) world.

Some people take time to think about separation and isolation, and look at the lessons we get from the Scrolls that teach that the priests were deliberately separated from everyone else. They even couldn’t go to family funerals, like many could not in the Corona crisis. Their job was to remain separate from the people they served, which may sound strange. But their goal was to maintain their close connection with the Most High in purity or holiness.

To remain separate at all times isn’t healthy for anyone. All over the world many learned that all too well the last two years. this year many felt a great joy they were able again to come together with some friends to do like the apostles did, following up the permanent ordinance… a celebration for all of God’s people throughout all time, remembering Passover.

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Find to read:

Times of seclusion, restriction, liberation, connection, religious affiliation and conversion

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Preceding

Measure of loneliness whilst time drags

Adar 6, Matan Torah remembering the giving of Torah

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Additional reading

1. Jewish diaspora
2. December a joyful time for many
3. Lenten Season and our minds and hearts the spiritual temple in which God seeks to live
4. Remember the day
5. Ransom for all
6. A perfect life, obedient death, and glorious resurrection
7. Redemption #4 The Passover Lamb
8. Redemption #7 Christ alive in the faithful
9. Atonement And Fellowship 8/8
10. A strange thing might happen when you come under Christ
11. Seeing or not seeing and willingness to find God
12. Falling figures for identifying Christians
13. What is happening in America to religion and to the language of faith
14. Who is a Jew?
15. Counting sands and stars
16. We Count. We Just Weren’t Counted.
17. Judaism and Jeshuaism a religion of the future
18. Great tribulation and Armageddon
19. Armageddon or the Great Tribulation
20. Ashkenazi Jews are extremely inbred

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Related

1. Passover Blessings – April 15th through 22nd, 2014
2. Proselytism
3. Jesus Became Our Passover Lamb
4. How Jews look to non-Jews – Part 1
5. Going back to shul
6. Fighting ignorance

Hitler and Christianity: Some Trends in Interpretation

 

Ryan Buesnel

A question was recently put to me by a reader who was curious to hear my thoughts on whether Hitler should be considered a “Christian” or an “atheist.” What had spurred this on was this reader’s consideration of the somewhat ambiguous topic of “Positive Christianity” — the allegedly Aryanized form of Christian doctrine that was to have served as National Socialism’s official form of religion.

Issues surrounding Hitler’s views on the person of Jesus Christ and the institution of the church are frequently obscured by prior ideological or religious commitments. On the one hand are those who have sought to restore the integrity of Christianity in light of accusations that it played an important historic role in the justification for anti-Semitism. This process of reconstruction required identifying occasions where Nazi ideology was opposed to the normative framework of Christian ethics. The suggestion was that the outcomes of Nazi policy were…

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Anti-Semitism in the United States

Although in many ways the U.S. Jewish population is flourishing, concerns about anti-Semitism have risen among American Jews. In the recent Pew Research Center’s survey of U.S. Jews, conducted from Nov. 19, 2019, to June 3, 2020, three-quarters say there is more anti-Semitism in the United States than there was five years ago, and just over half (53%) say that “as a Jewish person in the United States” they feel less safe than they did five years ago.

Probably this has a lot to with the way Donald Trump created a poisoned atmosphere.

Politically, U.S. Jews on the whole tilt strongly liberal and tend to support the Democratic Party, but the last few years in that party were many extreme right people who wanted a white Christian nation. When the new survey was fielded, from late fall 2019 through late spring 2020, 71% a lot of Jews said  they were still Democrats or leaned Democratic. Among Jews of no religion, roughly three-quarters were Democrats or leaned that way. But those who saw how their president went in against God’s Commandments could not support that party that had betrayed all democratic values.
Orthodox Jews have been trending in the opposite direction, becoming as solidly Republican as non-Orthodox Jews are solidly Democratic. In the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, 75% of Orthodox Jews said they were Republicans or leaned Republican, compared with 57% in 2013. And 86% of Orthodox Jews rated then-President Donald Trump’s handling of policy toward Israel as “excellent” or “good,” while a majority of all U.S. Jews described it as “only fair” or “poor.”

Jews who wear distinctively religious attire, such as a kippa or head covering, are particularly likely to say they feel less safe. But the impact on behaviour seems to be limited: Even among those who feel less safe, just one-in-ten – or 5% of all U.S. Jews – report that they have stayed away from a Jewish event or observance as a result.

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Preceding

Seeds from the world creating division and separation from God

The Rise of Anti-Seminism

Growing anti-Semitism possible sign of certain times

Quiz questions, views, left- and right-wing anti-Semitism

Historian Deborah Lipstadt Assesses the New Anti-Semitism

Trump’s rhetoric is infusing a culture of Anti-Semitism

Month of freedom and liberty with Independence Day or Deceived day

Judaism and Jewishness in 2020 America

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Additional reading

1. In Every Generation: The Return of Anti-Semitism – Pesah Day 1, 5779
2. The fight against anti-Semitism is also a fight for a democratic, value-based Europe
3. 2019 was #4 a Year of much deceit in Belgium and the rest of Europe
4. ….a powerful way to put the universe on notice….
5. A Secret of our Enemy :Inter-Ethnic Fault Lines Among the Jews (Full Article)
6. A vibrant and inclusive movement within the American Jewish community

Aalst Carnival and Unia analyses reports

Area of action: Society

Grounds of discrimination: Racism

In December 2018 Unia pressed in anti-Semitism hearings in the Belgian Senate for the reintroduction of an anti-Semitism watchdog. The organisation asked Minister Kris Peeters, at that time responsible for Equal Opportunities, to take the first steps towards an inter-federal action plan against discrimination and racism. Anti-Semitism remains a persistent problem. The calls being made by Unia in 2018 were in response to a large-scale survey of 16,000 Jews in twelve EU countries by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA), a human rights agency of the EU.

The findings of the report make for a sobering read. They underscore that antisemitism remains pervasive across the EU – and has, in many ways, become disturbingly normalised. Already in 2018 an overwhelming majority of survey participants felt that antisemitism was getting worse. They also feared for their own safety, and that of their loved ones. Though we also could notice not only the monotheist Hebrews or Jehudi were targeted. Jeshuaists and Muslims, worshipping the same God were not loved either and felt the pressure. Jeshuaists and Jews belonging to different Judaic denominations protect themselves by not coming out to much in the open and by leaving their kippa at home, only discreetly displaying mezuzas, avoiding certain areas in their cities or skipping Jewish events.

The many graphs contained in the report reveal a sobering picture of Belgium. Except for France, Jews do not experience anywhere in the EU as much hostility on the streets as they do in Belgium. Among those surveyed, 81 percent mentioned public spaces as the place with the most hatred of Jews. The European average is about 70 percent.

“These are figures that require a structural approach in the form of a vigilance unit and a plan that overarches policy areas,’

stressed Unia director at that time, Els Keytsman.

Already in 2018, a shocking statistic sended a clear message:

in the past five years, across twelve EU Member States where Jews have been living for centuries, more than one third say that they consider emigrating because they no longer feel safe as Jews.

In the meantime, we know about many Jews and Jeshuaists who left Belgium.

Much too many people seem to forget how antisemitic acts can have a profound impact not only on individuals and those close to them, but also on the Jewish community as a whole. Several manifestations may bring forward all sorts of the types of antisemitic acts which we see increasing since a decade and by the growing popularity of two Flemish National parties, the right-wing populist Flemish nationalist Vlaams Belang, with a strong anti-immigrant message that succeeded the right-wing Vlaams Block, and the Nieuw-Vlaamse Alliantie (N-VA – New Flemish Alliance), a movement that self-identifies with the promotion of civic nationalism, which strives for the secession of Flanders from Belgium.

The last few years in Belgium and France we have seen an increase in desecration of Jewish cemeteries, vandalism of Jewish buildings or institutions, expressions of hostility towards Jews and Jeshuaists in the street and other public places, but also an enormous antisemitism in the media. It is incredible what we can find on the internet, including social media, where nobody seems to be willing or able to silence the hate-speech.
In 2018 antisemitism online was already seen as a particularly widespread problem: a large majority of all respondents in the 12 survey countries (89 %) consider this either ‘a very big’ or a ‘fairly big’ problem, and as many (88 %) believed that it had increased over the past five years. The percentage of respondents indicating that antisemitism on the internet is problematic is especially high (at least 90 %) in Belgium, France, Italy, and Poland. In Belgium and France, a majority of respondents rated almost all antisemitic manifestations that the survey asked about as ‘a very big’ or ‘a fairly big’ problem. These are also the countries with the highest proportion of respondents indicating antisemitism in general as a problem.

The majority of respondents of that survey are aware of legislation that forbids discrimination based on ethnic origin or religion – some 64 %–87 %, depending on the area, indicated knowing about it. They are most aware of anti-discrimination legislation in employment and least aware of protection related to housing. Most respondents (71 %) also say they are aware of an organisation in the country that offers advice or support for people who are discriminated against, but we should be aware that out of self-protection most Jews and Jeshuaists do not dare to react or bring the problem into the public. Respondents most often referred to Jewish organisations specialising in the safety and security of the Jewish community and/or antisemitism, and national equal-ity or human rights bodies. Lots of Jews and Jeshuaists lost their trust in the Belgian State and in Belgian politicians.

Fortunatelyserious incidents are today punishable by law. For example, in 2018 Unia was a civil party in the case against the vandal who caused serious damage in the Jewish quarter of Antwerp.

“Unia was also a civil party in the case concerning the attack on the Jewish Museum in Brussels.”

Last November Unia was calling for a more inclusive image for folkloric events and intangible heritage such as the pre-Lent merrymaking and festivity carnival. Unia said local organisers and partners can play an important role in this. That is one of Unia’s recommendations in a report drawn up following the controversy about the anti-Semitic float in the municipality Aalst, on the Dender River, 24 km (15 miles) northwest of Brussels.

Unia feels that dialogue and awareness must be a priority.

“What is offensive to one person is apparently folklore for another. Showing consideration for other people’s sensitivities can never be simply imposed by law. Only through dialogue can we take into account the feelings of others and learn to see things from their point of view. “

That is why Unia organised meetings between Belgium’s Forum of Jewish Organisations and a group of Aalst carnivalists.

“Their float – depicting anti-Semitic stereotypes – was unintentionally reminiscent of Nazi propaganda. We understand that many people were shocked by this connotation, and it led to a highly polarised conflict. We have seen that both parties now have an understanding of each other’s position and context. Talking to each other does not guarantee that stereotypes will never crop up again, but it is a start.”

It could have gone the right way, but this year, it uncovered the hidden agenda more clearly. From what was presented at the cortège was more than just laughing with something that bothered them. It was showing their disgust for another culture and other religion than theirs.

Much too often we hear the excuse

“For carnivalists, freedom of expression means the freedom to make fun of anything and anyone.”

Though, one should question how far one can go with mockery. Unia says

“Conversely, that freedom also means that you are bound to provoke controversy now and then, and you have to be able to deal with criticism.”

People from Aalst seem to have lots of difficulty with the criticism they received over the last twelve months.

Lots of events happening in Aalst real lovers of God would never come to know if they were not shown on television and brought into social media.
Thanks to social media, images of parades and festivities are reaching the general public on an unprecedented scale and are thus amplified and sometimes, or more than once, may be taken out of context. Moreover, while in the past, traditions were not called into question, this questioning has now become appropriate, Unia notes.

“As such, that is a positive thing. Folkloristic events can evolve according to changing attitudes and new insights, allowing them to become celebrations in which no one is left out”,

according to Keytsman.

We do find politicians and organisations for protecting civilians, should recognise historical similarities and see the dangers behind certain events, which, in the beginning may look harmless and childish, but have a very deep and dangerous undertone. Puerile actions may develop into actions out of frustration and dissatisfaction which generates aggression against certain population groups.

This year out of frustration, how they were treated by Unesco, everal people in the parade mocked the specialized agency of the United Nations (UN), using Jewish caricatures as well.

But, from what we came to see and hear in the media, it went much further.

Unia promises to collect all the information and will investigate whether criminal offences were committed. For this, they are in contact with the prosecutor’s office and the police.

We wonder how Unia is going to act or take juridical prosecution against the group who had their float a sign labelled

“regulations for the Jewish party committee,”

and it included a not to misunderstand sarcastic:

“Do not mock Jews”

and a shocking

“Certainly do not tell the truth about the Jew.”

which clearly indicates they have formed an idea about Jews in general and do want others to believe that Jews have something to hide or do not want to have the truth about them told. This means those carnavalists understand the truth about the Jews is not or may not be told!?!

Rudi Roth, a journalist for the Antwerp-based Joods Actueel Jewish paper, said the expressions of anti-Semitism in Aalst this year were more numerous and prominent than last year. He called it a

“backlash effect.”

Coming closer to the event celebrities gave notice not having free time to come to the parade. Several politicians backed out of appearances with Aalst’s mayor, who has defended the parade displays.

According to Christophe D’Haese of the right-wing New Flemish Alliance, carnival is not an anti-Semitic event and should be seen in its context of

“everything is allowed”.

He said the event

“certainly has anti-Semitic elements,”

the likes of which he said had not been on display since the end of the Nazi occupation in 1945.

With good reason Rubinfeld said

“Aalst’s name is now associated with anti-Semitism,and that’s partly because of the mayor’s inaction.”

With questioning eyes, we are very curious to see whether Unia this year will make a real effort to go to court and make it clear that what has been shown this year in Aalst has been far out of proportion in our society and cannot be admitted.

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Preceding

What to do in the Face of Global Anti-semitism

Anti-Semitic pressure driving Jews out of Europe

Perhaps Anti-Semitism for lots of people isn’t always easy to see

What makes you following Christ and Facebook Groups

A Jew and Muslim walking together side by side down USA city streets

Speaking up and Celebration of Purim

Numbers 10:10 Make Your Rejoicing Heard

Niet te negeren gebeurtenissen rond Joden in België

Hoe ver kan men gaan om zich te beroepen op Vrije meningsuiting

Aalst Carnaval: Unia analyseert meldingen

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Related articles

1. Who is a Jew?
2. 25 Orthodox rabbis issued a statement on Christianity
3. Religious Practices around the world
4. 2014 European elections
5. January 27 – 70 years ago Not an end yet to genocide
6. World remembers Auschwitz survivors
7. Objective views and not closing eyes for certain sayings
8. Religion, fundamentalism and murder
9. 2015-2016 Religion
10. At the closing hours of 2016 #2 Low but also highlights
11. Questiontime 2016-2017 report
12. The American clouds of Anti-Semitism
13. Donald Trump after declining numbers of people victimised for their religion managed to increase the numbers again
14. Incidents of hate have become commonplace in the U.S.A. anno 2017
15. Trusting present youngsters who are not necessary evil
16. Is it time for UK Jews to pack the bags?
17. This fighting world, Zionism and Israel #6
18. ….a powerful way to put the universe on notice….
19. A convinced voice to debunk false allegations
20. Preparing for the most important weekend of the year 2018
21. A stain of shame for the European Union
22. Pushing people in a corner danger for indoctrination and loss of democratic values
23. Signs of the times – “An object of scorn and ridicule”
24. Signs of the times – “Anti-Semitism on the increase”
25. Establishment of a European Pillar of Social Rights
26. Our and EESC Workers’ Group Priorities for the European Union
27. The fight against anti-Semitism is also a fight for a democratic, value-based Europe
28. French showing to the whole world their fear and weakness
29. A new decade, To open the eyes to get a right view
30. A vibrant and inclusive movement within the American Jewish community
31. A Secret of our Enemy: Inter-Ethnic Fault Lines Among the Jews (Full Article)
32. In Every Generation: The Return of Anti-Semitism – Pesah Day 1, 5779
33. Luca Jahier, EESC President on the present intolerance
34. 2019 was #4 a Year of much deceit in Belgium and the rest of Europe
35. Seventy-five years ago on January 27
36. 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz
37. 5th World Holocaust Forum
38. 75 years after Auschwitz – Holocaust Education and Remembrance for Global Justice
39. By the commemoration of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp #2 Holocaust deniers and twisters of the truth
40. Is it really true that Anti-Semitism will never be tolerated?
41. Auschwitz survivors providing a warning of rising anti-Semitism and exclusion of free thinking
42. Agape or disinterested love
43. Love your neighbour as yourself
44. Pavé de mémoire en Belgique

     

Perhaps Anti-Semitism for lots of people isn’t always easy to see

When looking at the recent heathen festival “Carnaval” it looks like for the majority of Belgians antisemitism isn’t always easy to see. Last year there were already anti-Jewish groups in the carnival parade and this year they multiplied like the Coronavirus, where not many spoke about.

Already for a few years now, we can see that in Belgium Anti-Semitism moved quietly through each of the lives of many Belgians — in a tweet, or a joke, or a conspiracy theory — seemingly not having just impact on those it directly touches. It impacts us all.

Strangely enough, it seems that a lot of Belgians do not seem to see or can not recognize anti-Semitic words, phrases, ideas, and caricatures for what they really are — hatred, bigotry, discrimination. I was not present at the carnival parade in Aalst, but what I could see on the Flemish television was something one could expect many years before World War II, but not after that horrible period. On one of the cars hung a pamphlet whit something which shocked me Só Much, that I did not write it down, for being able to repeat it here or to fill in a complaint against the hate message and the anti-Semitic words written on that car!

The call for Jews having to go to Israel and to hide behind the Wall can not be called Jewish-friendly. “Muur” (Wall) may be “Mier” (Ant) in the dialect from Aalst, but to present Jews as ants can only be called “a bit inappropriate”.

The major of Aalst and many people from Aals, saying one has to be able to laugh with and at people and circumstances, may call for questioning how far one may go with mockery with situations and with persons or religious groups.
Certainly, in these times of a horrific rise in anti-Semitism, politicians should point to the fact of such matters to their citizens and should try to bring them to their sense. Though, the major of Aalst always when he was given the word, seemed to put more oil on the fire by just to dismiss it as something that is not understood by many outside Aalst.

Together, we can identify and expose the hate that’s hiding between the lines. Those with any good feeling of ethics and decency should call for a reaction of  “Unia”, the centre “For equality, against discrimination”.

What is going on in this country should ring a bell for the democratic parties and should bring the European Union sound the alarm, calling the national government to take action.

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Preceding

The danger of having less than 25 000 Jews in Belgium

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Find also

1. Haat tegen verarming en tegen Israël nieuwe manier om Joden te haten
2. Niet te negeren gebeurtenissen rond Joden in België
3. Prinsesjes en carnavalstoestanden #1 Aalst Carnaval 2019

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Relating

1. The fight against anti-Semitism is also a fight for a democratic, value-based Europe
2. Luca Jahier, EESC President on the present intolerance
3. 2019 was #4 a Year of much deceit in Belgium and the rest of Europe
4. Auschwitz survivors providing a warning of rising anti-Semitism and exclusion of free thinking

the Soup will not be eaten as hot as it is served

“Are they really bringing people to workplaces to give them a better life?”

It was known or said that even if Jews were converted to the Christian faith, they remained “different” because of their bloodline. It was also known that many were jealous for the lifestyle and family feeling which could  be found in the Klal Yisrael or Jewish communities. Many goyim found the Jews separated themselves from the society, but they did not often see it were goyim who themselves gave enough reason not to mix too much with them.

Samuel Morgenstern was one of those shopkeepers who was one of the most loyal buyers of Hitler’s paintings in Vienna, by which Hitler could receive enough money not to be a tramp. Naturally there were also rumours Hitler could not stand Jews because he got a disease from regularly going to some ‘Jewish harlots’.

Portrait of Karl Lueger (ca. 1900), mayor of Vienna. He used anti-Semitism as a political strategy. Collection: Austrian National Library / painter: Alois Delug. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Rights: Public Domain

Mein Kampf, (German: “My Struggle”) political manifesto written by Adolf Hitler. It was his only complete book and became the bible of National Socialism (Nazism) in Germany’s Third Reich. It was published in two volumes in 1925 and 1927, and an abridged edition appeared in 1930. By 1939 it had sold 5,200,000 copies and had been translated into 11 languages.

It perhaps were not just rumours that the politician, co-founder and leader of the Austrian Christian Social Party, and mayor of Vienna Karl Lueger (1844-1910), used anti-Semitism as a political strategy, and that he was also praised as “the greatest German mayor of all time” by Adolf Hitler (In Mein Kampf) who did not mind following his ideas.

The prejudices about the role of the Jews in the Great War were incorrect, but as with many rumours, it spread like a virus. Many Germans did not want to believe how more than one hundred thousand German and Austrian Jews had fought for their homeland, one of them being Otto Frank, the German-born merchant best known as the father of Anne Frank, who witnessed the Battle of the Somme in 1916.

In the 1920ies our family members could already hear how our brethren were compared with germs. It was as if our people had been infecting generations for ages. That Hitler never thought his people were not strong enough to live according to the wishes of their god or according to the mitzvot of the Only One True God, the Elohim Hashem Jehovah. Lots of our friends could not believe that those who said they were “Christian” and as such would, or should, be following the Nazarene Jewish rabbi who preached brotherly love, could do such atrocious things, as others told about them. Perhaps it was to set up Jehudiem against Christians, so that the goyim had all the reason to tell

religion is the cause of war.

The words spread that Hitler said that you cannot fight a disease without destroying the person who caused it, and as such according to him, the influence of the Jews would never disappear without removing the perpetrator, the Jude, from the midst of the Arian race.

Radical ideas paved the way for the mass murder of the Jews in the 1940s, but not many of the Bnei Yisroel or Chosen People of God wanted to believe the rumours at first.

In many families, like ours, it was the saying

“the Soup will not be eaten as hot as it is served”.

They heard about plans which would be taken, but they seemed so unbelievable that they could not be true or would have been exaggerated, as by a circling fire. Others were not so much at ease, and warned

“to be aware of a silent dog and still water”.

Should we look askance at him? Now we can easily say they had much better looked at him out of the tail of their eyes. By not believing the many rumours, lots were woken up with a start, when it was too late.

For a long time, many wondered if it was within the odds, whilst others said

“He is not likely to go.”

Others wanted to be a friend to all, forgetting that then they would be a friend to none. Many debates about what went on in Germany and Austria could bring lots of talks after the children were sent to bed. For sure that what was to be spoken about was not for children’s ears.

It was, and is still, known that there was and is, an existing prejudice that Jews associate with financial power and monetary gain. Many are also convinced Jews are “foefelaars“, who make their pile on the poor white people. Lots of Jews may be looked at as a ramay / nokhel, a fiddler or cheater whilst there was no oysnarn at all.

White movement propaganda poster from the Russian Civil War era (1919), a caricature of Leon Trotsky, who was viewed as a symbol of Jewish Bolshevism.

In many countries people also looked at the Jehudi as the originators or conspirators and spreaders of communism. The vast majority of the communist leaders at that time were Jewish. However, it is only a small part of the Jews that were communists, and what a lot of people did not see is that several Jews were promoting or aiming for social equality, this being considered by many liberals and capitalists a danger for the economy and consumption gain. During the war with the Soviet Union, from 1941 on, it will be the idea of the ‘Jewish communism’ (sometimes also called Marxian-communism or meant to be Jewish Bolshevism, also Judeo–Bolshevism) with terrible consequences. The population and the prisoners of war being brutally treated by the Germans.

When Hitler got into power rumours got stronger, but still many did not want to believe what went around. Others were smart enough to be at the safe site by sending their beloved far away from Germany and Austria. Some thought they would be safe in Holland, but how they were mistaken. Having gone to Holland luckily several managed to cross the channel and find a safe haven in the United Kingdom, but the others got taken and deported.

At the Schalkland, in the “Klein-Brabant” region, less than 25 kilometres from the centre of Brussels and 19 kilometres from Antwerp, to the south of the Dendermonde highway (Mechelen – Dendermonde) was build the “Willebroeck Fort” as a fortified defence to protect the port and city of Antwerp, which by Royal Order dated 12 January 1907 rechristened the fort “Breendonck Fort”. On september 20th 1940 Sturmbannführer Philip Schmitt brought his first victims to Breendonk. The Fort officially became the Auffanglager Breendonk, a transit camp; a major centre for the Sicherheitspolizei-Sicherheitsdienst (SIPO/SD), the german political police.

Words spread that in Breendonk the kaze-the mats were to be removed from the earth in which they were covered. Three or four men had to push a railway carriage that was loaded with the earth. It was not the best marterial the prisoners had to use. Of these vehicles, the wheels were worn out, having to be pushed on worn-out rails, so that a person would have more than it is possible. Was it a rumour or was it true that the SS guards, with their weapons beated on the upper arms, the backs of the heads of the unfortunate ones until the latter were exhausted, but also fell dead?

Former working site at the camp of Breendonk. The regime set up here by the Nazis hardly differed from that of an official concentration camp. The undernourishment and the forced labour wore down the body and mind. The ever-present physical cruelty sometimes caused the death of prisoners. Initially, the camp was only guarded by a few German SS and a detachment of the Wehrmacht. In September 1941, the Wachtgruppe of the SD arrived as back up. This time, these were no longer German SS but mainly Flemings.

Some of the prisoners were to be buried up to the neck, after they were first on a ferocious manner, beaten. The S, S. jailers were there, then settled for the pitiful earth at the face of them. The game lasted sometimes for 1 or 2 hours, and when the victims were about to die, they did not stop to punch and to death. During the singing of the song of Breendonk, the text of which these words were placed on the grave:

” Wir werden nie mehr Breendonk vergessen, das Paradies-tier Juden…’.”

Sturmbannführer (majoor) Schmitt had created and placed a pulley on the ceiling in a folterbunker (torture bunker or blockhouse) of the camp, to make, that the victim’s hands at the back tied up would be drawn to the ceiling.

After that, it was a pizzle of the shot, he was then beaten with a bullepees (bullenpees: baton between a whip and a stick made from dried penis of a bull). When the hoist was released, the unfortunate person fell on two angular boards. Kachelpoken or stove pokers were glowed for immediate use,… because the Jews were not worth the bullet. They had to be sent to death during work and by torture.

When the words rang true for most of the Jews still living in the region, it was too late to find a safe place for their children and for themselves.

After the camps in Belgium or Holland as “Musselmen” (completely emaciated) thousands were deported to Germany to find an end to their unbearable suffering, either of starvation, giving up, or in the gas chambers.

The remaining Jews in Belgium were unable to follow the course of events that their fellow believers underwent elsewhere. Their own concerns were too overwhelming for this and contact with neighbouring countries was too incomplete. The seeping job tidings were considered exaggerated …

Commissioned by the notorious member of Heinrich Himmler’s SS, the Nazi paramilitary corps, Adolf Eichmann, the Sicherheits polizei in Berlin, wrote the following urgent letter, in which the word “Secret” is not missing (22 June 1942):

“From mid-July and early August this year, special trains of 1,000 people each day are planned, first of all about 40,000 Jews from the occupied French territory,
Send 40,000 Jews from the Netherlands and 10,000 Jews from Belgium to employment in the Auschwitz camp.
“The circle of persons to be included extends primarily to Jews who are skilled in work, insofar as they do not live in mixed marriages and do not have the nationality of the British Empire, of the U.S.A., of Mexico, from the enemy states, from Central and South America, as well as from the neutral and related states.

“I may request willing access and assume that there are no objections to these measures on the part of the foreign office either.
Commissioned get. Eichman “

On 12 July 1942 the last restriction on freedom before the local raids started was put visible on billboards. From the onward Jews were no longer allowed to visit cinemas, theatres, sports grounds or public institutions. In the trams they were only allowed to stand on the front platform of the trailer.

Such regulations still did not unbalance many of the Jewish diluted community. According to many the German measures only wanted to deprive the Jews of public pleasures … (Few will then have immediately known that the first nocturnal masses in Paris on Friday July 17, 1942 raffle had taken place.)

Pennant for Organisation Todt

Woman with Ostarbeiter OT badge at Auschwitz

The second Jewish labour team was also confidently leaving the civil and military engineering organisation “Organization Todt” to Charleville-Mèzières (18 July), until on July 22 the second deception beared its bitter fruit.(It was the day that the memorial of the destruction of the Temple took place in Jerusalem in the evening – Tischa be’af – -). Jews were arrested without any excuse! When that day the trains from Brussels and Antwerp stopped at Mechelen as usual, Feldgendarmen were on the platform. All the Jews, both men and women, were taken out. The same happened at the Antwerp and Brussels North terminus stations. (The Brussels-North-South connection did not yet exist.) Their freedom had ended. Some went to Breendonk. Most were sent to the 18^th century Dossin barracks, where between 1942 and 1944, 25,484 Jews, 352 Roma and Sinti were deported. Just over 5% returned from Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Kazerne Dossin, Goswin de Stassartstraat 153, B. 2800 Mechelen, where in the old barracks, visitors will find a memorial, which commemorates countless people who stayed there in despair and fear and who died later in unspeakable circumstances.

From the onward the Jews throughout Belgium were being seized by panic. Being an ode alone was therefore sufficient here to be arrested … The Jewish Council was powerless … followed by a reaction of partial sobering among the Jewish population. They forged new flight plans that were kept secret even from close acquaintances.
The panic mood was tempered after a few days. When  people received mail from the internees in Mechelen it all looked not as bad as the rumours went around.

They are not nearly as bad there … Fruits are missing … They may receive packages …

Faces from those who lost their life after being brought to the Dosin Kazerne in Mechelen

These days we remember all those who lost their life in a struggle to survive in a hatefull world.

Let us not forget how politicians can use disinformation and propaganda to mislead many and to create unwanted scapegoats.
We also may not let ourselves be fooled this time that it would not be as bad today with what was happening in the 1930ies. There are people who say

That can never repeat again

but after the Great War all people agreed also that such a horror should never take place again. Only a few years later the world found itself again in such time or terror.

This time let us be more careful, notice the signs of people bringing others on the wrong path, and react wisely to those who want us to believe we are ridiculous seeing ghosts or bad things in what are just jokes or carnavalesc activities.

 

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Preceding

Remembrance and freedom in the Netherlands – Dodenherdenking and Bevrijdingsdag

Niet te negeren gebeurtenissen rond Joden in België

The danger of having less than 25 000 Jews in Belgium

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Additional reading

1. The Great War changed everything
2. Reformed Churches Muzzled but Protest at Barmen
3. 2019 was #4 a Year of much deceit in Belgium and the rest of Europe
4. Signs of the times – “An object of scorn and ridicule”

Month of freedom and liberty with Independence Day or Deceived day

Udo Ndah of Purple Rays thinks that July is the month of freedom and liberty!

I would love to be able to say “amen” to that, but I am afraid there are some figures in our present day who are bringing that freedom into a great danger and have made Independence Day July the 4th more into their own Donald Trump Day.

In one of our national languages we have the word “tromper” and “tromp”, to “deceive” and “deceived”.
I cannot resist the fact that several Americans must nevertheless come to the realization that they have made a serious mistake in the election of the current president. They also should have to come to know that anything that cost their peace would not only be too expensive but also something to avoid. And the present leader of the United States of America has had his finger already too many times on the “Red Button”.

 

Udo Ndah writes

July has one of the longest lists of Independence Day anniversaries; more than twenty days of the month are Independence celebration days for various countries including good old Uncle Sam (USA)! {Happy New Month of July!}

But where is that good popular old symbol for the United States Uncle Sam gone to?

Fox speaks about a “Great Awokening” (sic)

comparable in some ways to the enormous religious foment in the white North in the years before the American Civil War.

And tells us

It began roughly with the 2014 protests in Ferguson, Missouri, when activists took advantage of ubiquitous digital video and routine use of social media to expose a national audience in a visceral way to what otherwise might have been a routine local news story. It’s as if a special July energy triggers the ‘freedom hormones’ in humans urging them to break both individual and collective fetters! {The Great Awokening}

About Ferguson Trump showed his real face at several occasions or confrontations with the press. Nearly five years later, Fox does not seem to see that Mr. Trumps has made July the 4th in a Trump Day and has used  it for political election action work. Though they note that Trump has made white racial resentment more visible than it was before and remark

but at the same time, white liberals have become much more attuned to racism — seeing more of it not necessarily because the world has changed but because their own attitudes toward longstanding features of it have changed. {The Great Awokening}

Fox agrees that Trump’s presidency itself is probably a driver of the shift on LGBTQ issues, weapon matters, and racial thinking. Donald Trump and his allies’ support may for the world outside look like he is for the Jews. But they should see he is more for Israel’s right-wing government, which itself has made common cause with some European anti-Semitic nationalist movements. Others such as the historian David Henkin claim that many of Trump’s Orthodox supporters

“are the descendants (literally, in many cases) of Jews to whom the white nationalism of the post-1965 Republican Party was already resonating 30 or 40 years ago in debates about affirmative action, segregation, colonialism, and law enforcement.” Both theories, however, overlook Orthodoxy’s own position on anti-Semitism and the crucible in which it was formed.

Even Trump having a Jewish son in law, did not hinder him to more than once to give anti-Semitic remarks. Trump his strong support for Israel, the spiritual and religious centre of Judaism, does not make of him a saint.
The seeming contradiction between an American president who never misses an opportunity to boast about a largely symbolic embassy move and conversely misses every opportunity to denounce white nationalism, is according to some no contradiction at all. It comes as little surprise that the two American pastors that Trump delegated to bless the opening of the Jerusalem embassy respectively claimed that Hitler was a messenger sent by God and that Jews who do not embrace Christ are damned. Many Trump adepts by interviews from our Flemish television stations were or are convinced Trump is also a messenger of God.
Pastor Robert Jeffress responded,

“I have never said anything derogatory about the Jewish people. I talked about the oneness we share in worshiping the same God in the Scriptures.”

Though he and Trump worship a tri-une god whilst Jews, like me and other real Christians worship the Only One True God of Israel, the Elohim Hashem Jehovah, Who is an invisible God of love. In other interviews that pastor further explained,

“Jerusalem has been the object of the affection of both Jews and Christians down through history and the touchstone of prophecy.”

And Jews, Jeshuaists and real Christians do know that Jerusalem is going to be the capital of the Kingdom of God, But that does not mean that it is up to an American president to decide when it would be time to have Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

Jeffress’ focus on Judaism and disinterest in the global socio-economic well-being of Jews is borne out from recent polling data gauging American evangelical attitudes toward Jews and Israel. A 2017 LifeWay Research Poll revealed that upwards of 80 percent of American evangelical Christians believe that events surrounding the establishment of the State of Israel were the fulfilment of Bible prophecies that show we are getting closer to the return of Jesus Christ. On the other hand, only 20 percent of those polled understood these events in strictly geopolitical terms.

For many Americans Trump looks like the one preceding Jesus Christ bringing total liberation for the world they want to live in, without coloured people, without Hispanics, without Mexicans or any South American.
Those Americans do forget that lots of people had a marvellous idea of the nation they would have loved to live in. Many laid down their lives so that one day their progeny could feel proud of what the pioneers did and proud of that free country they could live in

Those ancestors had hopes that they and their offspring could exercise their treasures of traditions and values without fears of oppression and shadows of injustice in a nation where all the religions could reside with common opinions and behaviours and there not being to much difference of being on the top and those at the bottom.

Yesterday on the 5th of July 2019 Donald Trump used independence day to have hit his day, wanting to show to France, North Korea, Russia, that he too could govern a nation where there is place for military show and people parading for him as the masterful director of a great nation.

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Preceding

Prince of Wales warning that the world is in danger of “forgetting the lessons of the past”

Apocalyptic Extremism: No Longer a Laughing Matter

Russian involvement in US elections

Americans their stars, pretension, God, Allah and end of times signs #1 Abrahamic religions

Americans their stars, pretension, God, Allah and end of times signs #2 War on God’s Plan, Name and title

Trump’s rhetoric is infusing a culture of Anti-Semitism

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Find also to read

1. 2014 Human Rights
2. Does he really not know #1 Lies and money laundering
3. Does he really not know #2 Casinos and inner circles
4. Time to get out of the gridlock
5. Donald Trump his America

Trump’s rhetoric is infusing a culture of Anti-Semitism

“It’s clearly a sign that Trump’s rhetoric is infusing a culture of Anti-Semitism and hate against Jews and any group that doesn’t fit into the White Nationalist mindset.
These days are a very crucial time for American Jews to fight back against all threats made by extremists who are very ignorant about history and hope to keep us paranoid and scared.”

Eric Morris Eskenazi

 

Also in the U.S.A. Jews are frequent targets of hateful vandalism.
Here are some numbers from the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s report on hate crimes in the U.S. in 2017, which show how much of the hate crime vandalism reported in the U.S. that year targeted Jews.

Instances of hate crime vandalism: 2,325
Instances of hate crime vandalism targeting Jews: 691
Proportion of hate crime vandalism that targeted Jews: 30%
Proportion of Americans who are Jewish: Around 2%

Read more:

1. White Nationalism Is Spreading In The Orthodox Community
2. Spike In Anti-Semitic Vandalism: What You Need To Know
3. Think About The Spike In Anti-Semitic Vandalism

Anti-Semitism in Austria 2018 study results

Wolfgang Sobotka, president of the lower house of the Austrian parliament, presented the results of the “Anti-Semitism in Austria 2018” study in Vienna last week. It surveyed 2,731 respondents older than 16 including 604 Muslims.

Asked whether they agree with a statement blaming anti-Semitic persecution of Jews on their own behaviour, 19 percent of non-Muslims agreed. In the Muslim group, 45 percent of the respondents endorsed the statement.

Arab respondents, who made up half of the Muslim group, were slightly more likely than Turks, who made up the other half, to agree with the statement.

In the Turkish group, 28 percent agreed that “Jews still need to answer for the murder of Jesus.” The figure was 17 among Arabs and 13 among non-Muslims in the study.

Ten percent of non-Muslims agreed with the statement that “a lot is exaggerated in news about concentration camps” from the Holocaust. That figure was 41 percent among Turks and 35 among Arabs.

Asked to react to the statement that “Jews control international commerce,” 39 percent of non-Muslims concurred. The figures were 63 and 64 percent among the Turkish and Arab groups.

European governments rarely commission such aggregated surveys, which some perceive as discriminatory and which are illegal in some European states.

Karoline Edtstadler, state secretary in the Ministry of the Interior, said in a statement about the report:

“We will focus anti-racism efforts on immigrant children,”

the TRT Turkish news agency reported Tuesday.

Historian Deborah Lipstadt Assesses the New Anti-Semitism

Historian Deborah Lipstadt has published an accessible and comprehensive book about contemporary anti-Semitism called “Antisemitism: Here and Now.” The book, in which she spells anti-Semitism as “antisemitism” for reasons she outlines—is structured as a series of letters she writes to a fictional student and colleague — both of whom are composites of people Lipstadt has taught and worked with at Emory University in Atlanta.

Lipstadt, the author of books on Holocaust denial and the Adolf Eichmann trial, has experienced anti-Semitism as a result of confronting Holocaust deniers. In the early 2000s, she prevailed in a defamation lawsuit brought by David Irving, one of the more prolific and notorious Holocaust “revisionists.” Her victory was dramatized in “Denial,” a 2016 movie starring Rachel Weisz.

Lipstadt writes that anti-Semitism is challenging to define:

“It is hard, if not impossible, to explain something that is essentially irrational, delusional, and absurd.”

She recently spoke to JewishBoston about her new book and the ongoing scourge of anti-Semitism around the world.

°°°

Is today’s anti-Semitism “old wine in new bottles?”

On some level, it is old wine in new bottles. There are certain aspects of the stereotype which continue to exist and don’t go away. What’s different today is a number of things. First of all, it’s coming from the right and the left simultaneously. That’s different. At the same time, we’ve got a third source, and that is Islamic extremists who have been responsible for dangerous, deadly events in Europe. In some sectors of the Muslim community, it has become embedded among people who wouldn’t think to do anything violent but think evil things of Jews. This combination is different, but the charges are classic.

Actor Rachel Weisz and author Deborah Lipstadt on the set of their film “Denial,” a Bleecker Street release. (Photo credit: Liam Daniel/Bleecker Street)

In your introduction, you write, “By the time this book appears there will have been new examples of antisemitism.”

In some ways, the book is a work in progress. I was sure by the time it was published there would have been a number of instances that could have appeared. Five weeks after I hit the send button, Pittsburgh happened.

Speaking of ongoing anti-Semitism, what inspired you to write a book about it?

I wrote an article right after Gaza happened the summer of 2014 for The New York Times op-ed page. What struck me was the degree of anti-Semitism that got mixed up in opposition to that war. But it wasn’t just the war. There was the 2006 murder of Ilan Halimi. In 2012 there were the murders at a Jewish school in Toulouse. Then there was the shooting at the Jewish Museum of Brussels just before Gaza. Anti-Semitism was coming back in a way that deserved attention. The Times article was very popular, and my agent asked where my book proposal was. I sent him a brief proposal as a favor. He came back to me shortly afterward and said he sold the book. That’s how I came to write a book about anti-Semitism.

You talk about what I describe as “low-voltage anti-Semitism” that can happen casually at dinner parties or in dorm rooms. How do Jews deal with that?

While this book has received mostly amazing reviews, like any author, I tend to linger on the one or two negative ones. One of the reviews said I should not have told my fictitious student Abigail that when she encountered anti-Semitism among her roommates to go back and have a discussion. The reviewer said, “I would have told her to find new friends.” That’s the wrong answer. We’ll run out of friends very quickly if we do that. There is a lot of misunderstanding of what anti-Semitism is and what constitutes it. Our job should be to try to explain that to people. However, when you call me a termite [as Louis Farrakhan did] because I’m a Jew, I’m not going to try and educate you anymore. We have to discern between ignorance and what is absorbed from the ethos sphere, and the committed anti-Semite.

What do you say to young Jews participating in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement? And what are some of the anti-Semitic tropes associated with BDS?

Many people on campus who support BDS probably couldn’t find Israel on a map. I don’t immediately brand every person who supports BDS as an anti-Semite. Some people erroneously equate BDS with their parents’ votes against apartheid. But if you drill down to what BDS is all about it, it calls for the destruction of the state of Israel. That is anti-Semitism. As for the tropes, it’s this talk of power, control and money. It’s the anti-Semitic stereotypes put into a Middle Eastern context. A few days ago, people said the seven Labour lawmakers who resigned over anti-Semitism in their party were being paid to do so by Israel. If that supposition weren’t so dangerous, it would be simply absurd.

(Courtesy image)

Are anti-Zionists and anti-Semites the same?

They are backing into each other. If you look at each of them in 1935 or 1945, they are not one and the same. Bret Stephens had a great article about the difference. I second what he says very much. Look at the division and we now see something quite distinct. We see something that has become this hostility to Israel. Opposition to Israeli policy is not anti-Semitism. It’s important to recognize that. We’re talking about a myopic view that all the troubles in the world are the Palestinians’—the only one at fault in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is Israel. Something is wrong with that.

I recently heard a story about a student in a New York City public high school who asked her teacher to sign a letter of recommendation for a summer program. She brought him the form, and when he saw it was for Israel, he said he wouldn’t write a letter for her. She asked if he would write a letter for a program in North Korea, China, Myanmar or Sudan, and he said yes.

Something is wrong when your singular focus is on one country. Something is wrong when you look at this complicated situation in Israel where there are wrongs on both sides. We see a dedication to Palestinian organizations that have a major commitment to the destruction of Israel within their charters. And you have to ask, why this myopic view? That’s when you come to anti-Semitism.

It’s almost Purim, and your middle name is Esther. Do you feel you have a Queen Esther-like role in the Jewish community?

Someone once sent me a quote from the Book of Esther where Mordechai comes to Esther to tell her she has to approach the king, or our people will be murdered. She initially says she can’t go to the king because she will be killed. But then she does talk to him on behalf of her people. In fighting deniers and anti-Semitism, I don’t feel I’m a queen of anything. What I do feel is very gratified that I’ve been given a chance to do this work. I wish anti-Semitism were an old problem, but there’s an urgency to understand it. People are so grateful and appreciative that I do that. I feel humbled and thankful that I’m getting this kind of reaction. I’m not a Queen Esther, but I have been given a similar gift of being in the right place at the right time. This enables me to contribute to an important battle.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

By Judy Bolton-Fasman for JewishBoston

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Related

• 

  Holocaust Historian Deborah Lipstadt Prevails in “Denial”

  

  Judy Bolton-Fasman

The danger of having less than 25 000 Jews in Belgium

Most of the countries that have their Jewish population dropped below the 25,000 level over the past 70 years were in Arab and Muslim countries including Morocco, Egypt, Algeria and Iran, as those countries effectively expunged the Jewish populations due to anger over the founding of Israel. The total population from all of those Arab and Muslim countries now stands at 27,000, just north of the 25k mark (15k in Turkey, 5,800 in Iran, 2,000 in Morocco and Tunisia 1,000).

On Thursday, after a two-month trial in the Belgian capital, 12 jurors found the 33-year-old guilty of the four anti-Semitic murders during a shooting spree at Belgium’s Jewish Museum in Brussels on May 24, 2014. It was not the first incident against Jews in that country, but it may be considered as the first terrorist attack by IS and the turning point for many Jews to feel not safe any-more in Belgium, because the country from then onwards started also showing an evolution to the far-right and anti-Semitic groups.

Kölner Karnaval Nazi-propaganda against Jews – Germans making fun of Jews in the 1930s

Aalst Karnaval 2019 Joodse Karrikaturen – Recycled puppets for 2019 Aalst Carnaval

We can question of the depiction of Jews in the carnival of Aalst would be of similar intent to what could be seen in Germany in the 1930ies. The stereotypes and images found in Nazi propaganda were not new, but were already familiar to their intended audience. You can not ignore that it reminds us of the Nazi-propaganda during the rise of Nazism. If that carnival group wanted to have a sabbath year, why did they spend so much money on such puppets? Such depictions are just provoking and are adding to the trouble atmosphere which is growing in Belgium.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish organization headquartered in the US, believes that Aalst Carnaval defiles the reputation of Belgium as the host country of the European institutions. This is stated in an open letter to Federal Minister of the Interior Pieter De Crem (CD & V). The federal government must, according to the director of international relations Shimon Samuels, patronize the Aalst carnival group publicly.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center is an NGO that collects it worldwide for the interests of Jews.

‘We are disgusted by the images of the parade during the carnival on 3 March in Aalst’,

is the letter to Minister De Crem.

‘With stereotyping and hateful images of Jews with bags full of money and hook-noses that are reminiscent of Nazi collaborating Belgium.’

Also the Jewish community was very chocked with those images, which reminded of the years before the 2nd World War.

parade float at the Aalst Carnaval in Belgium features caricatures of Orthodox Jews atop money bags, March 3, 2019 Aalst Carnaval

B’nai B’rith International termed it “disgusting.” Both umbrella groups of Belgian Jews filed a federal complaint for incitement against the group, called Vismooil’n, saying the float looked like Nazi propaganda.

Even the European Commission slammed the display, with a spokesperson saying

“It is unthinkable that such imagery is being paraded on European streets 70 years after the Holocaust.”

Why do those people from that group Vismooil give the impression that Jews are the cause of the rising prizes?

Joel Rubinfeld, the president of the Belgian League Against Anti-Semitism, or LBCA.

“Prices are rising, so who do they blame? The fat, greedy Jew,” he said.

Not only on a Facebook page of carnival enthusiasts, we could see lots of “anti-Semitic humour”.

One blamed

“the sad Jews, closed off from the rest of society in Antwerp, who have no sense of humour.”

Another referred to Jews as “dick cutters,” adding they are

“whiners with sausages for ears and woolly curls on their heads.”

Commenting on Jewish anger over the float, another wrote:

“Later you wonder why Jew hatred is growing …”

For Rubinfeld it is

“What’s happening in recent years at the carnival is a symptom of a wider problem, which the return of 1930s anti-Semitism, alongside the upgraded version that we’ve become used to, that targets Israel as a substitute for Jews and visa versa.”

At the moment there is an American petition concerning the Aalst Carnival on the Unesco-heritage-list to remove its status as an intangible heritage. What the carnival group the Vismooil Sunday has shown, with the Jewish decorated float, in any case does not fit with the norms and values that Unesco stands for.

We must take the “view on the Jews” seriously. We may not ignore a serious peril of a growing negative stance against Jews and Muslims. In europe there is a growing tendency to have bad jokes about Jews and to point the finger as if they would be part of the present problems.

Vile comments made by elected officials (including in the US, UK and Iran) attacking Jews and basic Jewish human rights in those two remaining outposts – and defended by senior politicians – rises to the level of attempted genocide of the Jewish people. {FirstOneThrough}

We cannot stay silent and should speak up. We also should show non-Jews that there are different Jewish communities with different lifestyles. But also Jews could come to see that in Christendom and in Islam there are very different groups with totally different ideas. Not all those different groups have a grudge against the other. There are enough religious and non-religious groups who are willing to live together in symbioses. Best way not to make people so afraid they find it better to leave the country is making sure they all feel welcome and can trust each other.

It is up to the governement to make sure that those people who are a danger for democracy are disciplined.

In Belgium the politicians and the police should also show they are taking certain matters seriously and should further protect all of the Jewish community. But also in the Jewish community Jews should make work of it to communicate better with each other and to accept the different sorts of Jews in this country.

Also let us think about why there are now 17 countries with over 25,000 Jews which is half of the total that existed when Israel was founded in 1948.

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Find to read:

1. 25,000 Jews Remaining
2. Jews and Christians against Messianics and Jeshuaists
3. A Hebrew-Christian movement
4. Jewish millennials between 2013 and 2017
5. Jeshuaists = Juifs pour Jeshua ou Jésus Christ
6. Marchons avec courage!

Numbers 10:10 Make Your Rejoicing Heard

After the recent attacks on a Jewish graves and houses, last week, once again the People of God were reminded that anti-Semitism is growing again in West-Europe. In many Jewish households this brings the discussion on the table to stay more quiet and to take care not to stand out too loud.

Though those who love God should recognise all good what He has done to them and should not be afraid to tell others about it. Fear may come into our houses but our love for God and our hope for the better future should make us strong enough to tell others of the Plan of God and ho everybody should come united under the Elohim’s Guidance.

For sure those who live with the hope for a better future in the Kingdom of God, should not stay in the dark or rejoice in secret, but should share with many their hope and joy and show the world how the Most High Elohim expects more people to come to Him and to be blessed, spreading the peace by the love for others worth of God.

For sure, we do not have to be ashamed or to be afraid. Let us , who love God, all unite and blow the trumpet and let everyone know. Let us show the world Who God is and what He wants from us. And let us lift up God by our praise, not being ashamed to rejoice out loud as we remember God’s work in our life.

Insights From Tom

Also at your times of rejoicing–your appointed festivals and New Moon feasts–you are to sound the trumpets over your burnt offerings and fellowship offerings, and they will be a memorial for you before your God. I am the LORD your God. Numbers 10:10

The world knows how to make their rejoicing about something good known to the rest of the world. Watch when their favorite football team wins the winning goal at a major game. The fans go crazy with shouting and jumping around. Social media is blown up with the news of what happened. It is no secret what happened or what is going on.

This not only happens with sports fans, but with many other major events in life. Great news is passed on very quickly with a loud noise.

God had told the Israelites that when they were rejoicing at one of the various set festivals, they…

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a Call to stop the growing anti-Semitism

It is not new. Already several months we can see there is a growing anti-Semitism again in France and Belgium. The home to the biggest Jewish community in Europe, France , represents around 550,000, a population that has grown by about half since World War Two, but anti-Semitic attacks remain common. Government statistics released last week showed there were more than 500 anti-Semitic attacks in the country last year, a 74 percent increase from 2017.

Alarming it should be that it seems that the Jewish communities across West-Europe feel much more endangered that non-Jews think they are.
A 28-country survey by the European Commission, published last month, revealed a gap in perceptions between those in and out of the Jewish community.
According to the report, 89% of Jewish people said anti-Semitism had “significantly increased” over the last five years. Only 36% of non-Jews believed the same.

Among the incidents arousing worries of renewed anti-Semitism was a torrent of hate speech directed at Jewish philosopher Alain Finkielkraut during a Saturday march by yellow vest protesters.

In recent incidents, swastika graffiti was found on street portraits of Simone Veil — a survivor of Nazi death camps and a European Parliament president who died in 2017. The word “Juden” was painted on the window of a bagel restaurant in Paris, and two trees planted at a memorial honouring a young Jewish man tortured to death in 2006 were vandalized, one cut down.

Friday , two youths were arrested after they allegedly fired shots at a synagogue with an air rifle in the Paris suburb of Sarcelles, where a large Jewish community lives. Sarcelles mayor Patrick Haddad told BFMTV on Tuesday that prosecutors believe the motive was anti-Semitism.

According to sociologist Danny Trom, author of “France Without Jews,” thousands of Jewish people leave France every year because of anti-Semitism.

“This is a low-intensity war, perhaps, but let’s not forget the murder of children killed at close range by Mohamed Merah in a school,”

Trom told French magazine Telerama, referring to the 2012 slayings of three children and a teacher from a Jewish school by an Islamic extremist in the southwestern city of Toulouse.

In West Europe since the dawn of time there have been Jews. In the previous century they had a terrible time, but one would have thought after that period everyone would want that human scandal to remain covered for good. Though the last few years it seems there are again seeds of weed sawn. Now, the pressure is such that several Jews are led to consider their country inhospitable.

In a tweet last week, Olivier Faure, first secretary of the Socialist Party, first called on people to gather in Paris for a protest on Tuesday. The event was later organised with the endorsement of more than 50 political parties, unions and associations.

No official number has been reported, but similar demonstrations were reported in 60 cities including Marseille, Bordeaux and Nantes.

Thousands of people rallied across what should be “the Land of equality” (France) after a surge of anti-Semitic attacks in recent weeks that culminated on Tuesday with vandals daubing swastikas and anti-Jewish slogans on dozens of graves in a Jewish cemetery.

Political leaders from all parties, including former Presidents Francois Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy, gathered in Paris filling the Place de la Republique, a symbol of the nation, to decry anti-Semitic acts with one common slogan:

“ça Suffit” = “It is Enough!”

The French have enough of racist acts and of discrimination and hate for others

French President Emmanuel Macron, after he had visited the vandalized Jewish cemetery in Quatzenheim, a small town in the northeastern Alsace region, said he felt shame at the sight of the defaced grave markers. He clearly was very much impressed and the grieve and disgust for what had happened was on his face. Macron observed several moments of silence in front of the vandalized graves while local Jewish community representatives stood by.

“We will take action,”

he promised.

Afterwards he went to the Shoah Memorial, a Holocaust museum in Paris, to observe a moment of silence with parliament leaders, and said

“Every time a French person, because he or she is Jewish, is insulted, threatened — or worse, injured or killed — the whole Republic” is attacked.”

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*https://www.bbc.com/news/av/embed/p071cd8v/47300117*

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Martin Luther “Last Words of David” (1543) a polemical work bearing the same ugly language as in “On the Jews and their Lies” (1543)

Many people do forget how Luther did not like women, Jews and Muslims.
A Lutheran pastor but not a Lutheran scholar dares to look at the works of Luther in an attempt

to go through Luther’s works interpreting scriptures which may not be as concise as many of his theological works but give me as a reader some exposure to the evolution of Luther’s thought and theology in conversation with the Word that he cherished. {An Ongoing Reference to Luther’s Works}

He also thinks

it is useful as we approach each volume to honestly look at what Luther’s interpretation over 500 years ago in his earliest works might have to still contribute in our time (and some books will be better handled by Luther’s theology than others). {An Ongoing Reference to Luther’s Works}

Last Words of David (1543) – This is a polemical work and it bears the same ugly language of On the Jews and their Lies which appeared in the same year. This is the dark side of Luther’s Christocentric way of approaching scripture.
If you want to learn about Luther’s later views on the Jewish people and Muslims this is one of the places where his anti-Jewish views are clearly exhibited.
Luther spends a lot of time revisiting the Christological debates of the early church and attempting to argue in a way that would be unlikely to convince anyone who wasn’t already a Christian. Perhaps he was trying to erase any perception that he could have been an ally to the Jewish people from some of his earlier writings, but this is really an ugly piece.
~An Ongoing Reference to Luther’s Works

Martin Luther (1523) by Lucas Cranach

French rabbis of the suburbs confront anti-Semitism

Last year 50 000  Jews left France for better pastures. In Belgium we also find many who preferred to go to Israel and to face the difficulties there between Palestinians and Israeli soldiers.

When rabbi Prosper Abenaim first arrived at La Courneuve’s Ahavat Chalom synagogue in 1992 there were over 4,000 Jews in the neighbourhood then and at that time it was a struggle to fit them all into the synagogue on Yom Kippur. Today, at this Paris suburb’s only Jewish facility, he serves sweet tea to his synagogue’s most frequent and reliable guests: machine gun-toting troops of the French Legion which entered the seen on January 2016 to defend Jews in this heavily Muslim and crime-stricken municipality bordering the capital. This dwindling community, which has lost thousands of congregants over the past two decades to Israel and safer areas of Paris has now on some mornings, troops outnumbering worshippers.

That wasn’t the case when Abenaim first arrived at La Courneuve’s Ahavat Chalom synagogue in 1992. There were over 4,000 Jews in the neighbourhood then and it was a struggle to fit them all into the synagogue on Yom Kippur.

“The shul overflowed onto the street,”

Abenaim recalled.

Since then, improved economic fortunes and repeated anti-Semitic attacks have driven out all but 100 Jewish families from the neighbourhood, where drug dealers operate openly on streets that residents say police are too afraid to patrol. The remaining Jews are mostly a greying bunch, stuck here for financial reasons.

“We have two big problems, extremism and criminality, and they often mix,”

said Abenaim, who lives in Paris’ affluent and heavily Jewish 17th arrondisement and has encouraged his congregants to leave for Israel.

“I understand why people don’t want to raise children here. I’m here myself only because of my duties. Otherwise, I’d be in Israel.”

Rudy Abecassis, a Marseille-born computer specialist who moved to the Paris region in 2009 to find work, had a good job at a time of rising unemployment. In 2016 his family also left behind their comfortable lives and moved to Israel, joining nearly 8,000 French Jews who Abecassis said

immigrated to Israel in 2015.

“We’re not fleeing,”

He had found a nice life in France and he loved France for it,  leaving it with sorrow. For him it being important

“to live in a Jewish country of our own, where we are not outsiders who need to be tolerated.”

Tolerance is the big word we have to look for these days. When we hear small children saying Jews are dangerous people we can wonder what they hear their Muslim parents telling about Jews.

Most Jews in France are not affiliated with any synagogue, while the majority of those who are belong to Orthodox synagogues. The third major current of Judaism in France is the Conservative or Massorti movement (with a.o. rabbi Haim Fabrizio Ciprian in Marseille). Next to them there are the Liberal and Reform Jews. The “Libérale” in French corresponds to the Reform movement in the UK and the US, though for some Americans its approach might appear to be midway between Reform and Conservative.

‘For French who do not have the American connection, if you’re Jewish, Israel is the easy place to go. Otherwise the other ambitious entrepreneurs of that age who are not Jewish and are not going to think of going to Israel tend to go to London, which is now the seventh largest ‘French’ city.”

says the American Rabbi Tom Cohen from the synagogue Kehilat Gesher in Paris’s 17th arrondissement.

In those suburbs Rabbi Michel Serfaty is not afraid to go to talk to the Muslims and to create events for Muslim kids. He also created a community or “French Jewish Muslim Friendship Association” for which he hopes to recruit several more young people to help with community outreach in the largely Muslim, immigrant communities where most people have never even met a Jewish person.

A poster for the French Jewish Muslim Friendship Association, which works in many poor, immigrant neighborhoods. – Eleanor Beardsley/NPR

 

Speaking up and Celebration of Purim

Tonight starts the celebration of Purim, for many known as the Jewish carnival. In many families it is a pleasant day for the kids they being allowed to dress up and them looking for presents which are sent by family members and friends. First the children were asked to fast and to keep those things that the like much, to share with others who have less then them.

From today until Schmini Shel Pesach the final day of Passover on Nisan 22, commemorating the Splitting of the Red Sea, the climax of the Exodus from Egypt, and the day when we focus on the final liberation, the one that’s yet to happen. We look at the days of or moments of liberation the Hashem has given to His People. These days we remember the time of Moshe and Estêr, but also we reflect on the way God is with us all the time.

Starting with the commemoration of the salvation of the Jewish people in ancient Persia from the wicked Haman his plot

“to destroy, kill and annihilate all the Jews, young and old, infants and women, in a single day,”

as recorded in the Megillah (book of Esther).

Esther before Ahasuerus, by Franciszek Smuglewicz, 1778

The Jew-hating Haman, appointed prime minister of the Persian Empire under King Aḥašvērōš, convinced the king to issue a decree ordering the extermination of all the Jews on the 13th of Adar, a date chosen by a lottery Haman made.
Mardəkī or Mordecai galvanized all the Jews, convincing them to repent, fast and pray to the Most High Elohim. After the first wife of the king had been executed for failing to follow his orders, he arranged a beauty pageant to find a new queen. A Jewish girl, Esther, found favour in the king’s eyes and became the new queen, though she refused to divulge her nationality. After Haman had required to kill the Jews Esther revealed to the king her Jewish identity, which would mean when the decree would be executed his beauty and loved one would be killed also. To avoid such drama Haman was hanged and instead of him Mordechai was appointed prime minister. A new decree was issued, granting the Jews the right to defend themselves against their enemies.

On the 13th of Adar, the Jews mobilized and killed many of their enemies. On the 14th of Adar, they rested and celebrated. In the capital city of Shushan, they took one more day to finish the job.

Since Haman had thrown lots to determine when he would carry out his diabolical scheme this remembrance period is also called “Feast of lots”.

Queen Estêr (Esther) is the heroine of the Megillah tale, and has been a character used in several films and some ballets. From a simple girl she could take a very high position, which made her able to use her influence to save the Jewish people. But this was only possible by revealing her nationality. She could have been quiet and let the Jews been killed, but preferred to speak, endangering herself. Though the king madly in love with her did not kill her but killed the man who had asked for the Jews to be killed.

Married to a non-Jew she was stuck having the privilege to live in a palace, and the years after this event was still unable to join her people in their celebrations. She had saved her people, but could not save herself from her ‘castle-walls’. She was trapped, living between two worlds.

We have to take care we get not trapped, but also that we do not stay silent. Certainly in these times when we can find more and more people who do find that this world only belongs to (trinitarian) Christians. Looking around and following the news, we hear several times a week how Jews are bullied or even how certain people try to kill Jews on the street (like the incident in Antwerp last week).

Rabbi Michael Knopf who writes extensively on matters of halakhah (the Jewish legal tradition) a few days ago wrote about Purim and the Responsibilities of Privilege and looking at our position in this world wrote:

We cannot be truly safe, truly free, truly prosperous, until everyone is safe, free, and prosperous.

He also remembered Martin Luther King, Jr. who wrote,

“I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” (“Letter from a Birmingham Jail”).

These coming days we especially look at the way God helped His People and how they acted in their life on the way to the Promised Land. Most of them never saw that place which could have been an ‘heaven on earth’. Throughout history we have seen many pogroms and years of torture and killings of our ancestors. These days we can remember them but also remember the liberation of so many. Because these days that is going to be our focus, how the Elohim is there to help us and to guide us to be able to live in a world which does not like the Children of God. Going up to Pesach, the climax of the year 15-22 Nisan, remembering the Passover and liberation of Gods people.

The Rabbi reminds us:

If you are reading this column, chances are good that you are among the ranks of the most fortunate people to ever live.
Mordechai‘ s challenge to Esther is, therefore, our challenge as well. When there are those in our world, in our country, whose lives are at risk, do we stand by, fearful that speaking up will cost us our position? Or do we remember that our fate is bound up in their fate, too, and perhaps we have attained our privilege for just such a crisis?

This was the question of Esther’s time. This is the question of our time. As we celebrate Purim, let us honor Mordechai’s challenge, and recall Esther’s heroic response. {Purim and the Responsibilities of Privilege }

On the Israel Forever Foundation website and on Inspiration from Zion: This is a Love Story we also find the warning

Today we are not witnessing the Holocaust but there are world leaders who advocate for the elimination of the Jewish State. There are individuals who openly declare that the genocide of the Jewish people should have been completed. Antisemitism is again becoming something that is socially acceptable to express in public. {Purim: Not to speak is to speak}

And a question

In a world where Antisemitism is again becoming socially acceptable, where Jews are told that they cannot be both feminists and Zionists and many Jews are afraid to speak out about the injustices against our people – what message could be more relevant? {Purim: Not to speak is to speak}

 

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Additional reading

1. Purim or Ta’aniet Estêr
2. Beginning of weeks for the Feasts of deliverance
3. The son of David on the first day of the feast of unleavened bread
4. High Holidays not only for Israel
5. 8 Reasons Christian Holidays Should Not Be Observed
6. Observance of a day to Remember
7. Around the feast of Unleavened Bread
8. Day of remembrance coming near
9. Actions to be a reflection of openness of heart
10. Solution for Willing hearts filled with gifts
11. Vayikra after its opening word וַיִּקְרָא, which means and He called
12. Deliverance and establishement of a theocracy
13. Preparation for Passover
14. A new exodus and offering of a Lamb
15. Sukkoth, Gog, Magog, Armageddon, a covenant and Jerusalem
16. Wednesday 5 April – Sunday 9 April 30 CE Pesach or Passover versus Easter
17. Most important day in Christian year
18. Most important weekend of the year 2016
19. This day shall be unto you for a memorial and you shall keep it a feast to the Most High God
20. 14-15 Nisan and Easter
21. 14 Nisan a day to remember #1 Inception
22. 14 Nisan a day to remember #2 Time of Jesus
23. 14 Nisan a day to remember #3 Before the Passover-feast
24. 14 Nisan a day to remember #4 A Lamb slain
25. 14 Nisan a day to remember #5 The Day to celebrate
26. Easter holiday, fun and rejoicing
27. A Great Gift commemorated
28. Jesus memorial
29. Thinking about fear for the Loving God and an Invitation for 14 Nisan
30. What to do in the Face of Global Anti-semitism

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Related articles

1. Esther Nine: Purim
2. Shabbat, Purim, and What Makes You Happy
3. Of Hats, Pockets, Ears, and Hidden Messages
4. If the Shoe Fits (Purim)
5. Purim and Living Between Worlds
6. Purim To The RescueThe Purim Miracle 1
7. The purim miracle 2
8. Deceit Meets Truth at PurimPurim… The Invisible Hand – By MarcPurim: Not to speak is to speak
9. Purim or Feast of lots
10. Purim Sameach!
11. Purim | Looking Beyond the Smoke, Mirrors & Masks
12. The Rebbe on Parashat Zakhor and Purim (March 23-24, 1940 in the Warsaw Ghetto)
13. For Such a Time as This
14. Kosher Wine and Show Tunes on tap for Purim
15. Rav Avigdor Miller on Drinking Like a Goy on Purim
16. The holiday of Purim
17. #Purim Life Takes A-Way M’om’ents; Thy Divine Sight, Makes A-Weigh For More Meant/Mentorship of Meritorious M’om’entum’s Immaculate/Infinite/Evolutionary Worthiness Exalted Renaissance Orientated C’om’munion’s……………
18. Purim, Exile, and Redemption
19. Purim and the Responsibilities of Privilege
20. The Coin Flip (Purim)
21. Purim: The Upside Down Drama of Esther
22. Esther 9, the Jews triumph, Purim celebrated.
23. Purim 2018
24. The Purim-miracle 4
25. For Such a Time as This

Many members of Jewish community wondering if they are still welcome in Poland

In the European Union we can find more groups which deny the atrocities that happened only a little bit more than half a century ago. In a few weeks’ time, Poland’s Jewish community will mark the 50th anniversary of the events of March 1968. They will do so in the wake of arguably the most serious crisis in Polish-Jewish relations since the fall of communism in 1989, after the passage of controversial legislation criminalising the attribution to the Polish state or Polish nation of complicity in the crimes committed by Nazi Germany during the Holocaust.

“About the Jewish Community” in Warsaw – Photo by Marysia Galbraith, cultural anthropologist, professor at New College and the Department of Anthropology at The University of Alabama, and Fulbright scholar in Poland for the 2014-2015 academic yea

Perhaps 10% of the of the pre-war Jewish population in Poland may have survived World War II and could see her Jewish culture to resurrect itself driven by the younger generation taking almost 50 years to face now again some danger. Also the relations between Poland and Israel may seem to come in their deepest crisis in memory in the wake of Poland’s move to criminalize criticism of Polish collaboration with the Nazis during the Holocaust.

To understand why this state of affairs is dangerous, regrettable and difficult to resolve, it is important to consider it against the backdrop of wider European-Israel and European-Jewish relations.

Speaking to the Observer, members of the Polish-Jewish community and activists involved in Polish-Jewish dialogue and reconciliation have expressed their shock and dismay at this deterioration in public discourse. While stressing that the present crisis is not comparable to that of March 1968, many said that, with their loyalties once again being called into question, the echoes of the rhetoric of the “anti-Zionist campaign” were too uncomfortable to ignore.

“We are receiving antisemitic, anti-Jewish statements on a daily basis,”

said Anna Chipczyńska, president of the Jewish Community of Warsaw.

“Members of the community feel that their loyalty is being questioned, that people are expecting them to take a side. Some of them also indicate the silence of friends and work colleagues in the face of these attacks, and this really hurts them.”

Still today we must be very well aware that anti-semitism in Poland is so high that Poland is listed the second most anti-Jewish country in Europe (Spain is first) according to a 2008 Pew survey of European sentiments towards Jews. 36 percent of Poles express hostility towards Jews. we can also not undue the impression that Poland wants to whitewash the role of the Poles who killed or denounced Jews during the German occupation of Poland during World War II.

2018 February 6, Tuesday Polish President Andrzej Duda signed legislation that outlaws blaming Poland as a nation for Holocaust crimes committed by Nazi Germany, defying both criticism from Israel and a warning from the U.S.

For some long time we could hear Polish officials arguing that a Holocaust speech law was needed to fight the use of expressions like “Polish death camps” as shorthand for the German camps in Nazi-occupied Poland where Jews and others were exterminated. U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said the new law

“adversely affects freedom of speech and academic inquiry.”

and found that the

“terms like ‘Polish death camps’ are painful and misleading,”

best countered through

“open debate, scholarship, and education.”

Though President Andrzej Duda said he would also ask Poland’s constitutional court to evaluate the bill said it would not prohibit Holocaust survivors and witnesses from talking about crimes committed by individual Poles.

“We do not deny that there were cases of huge wickedness,”

he said in a speech but made it clear not the whole Polish nation could attributed to be guilty for what happen in their heimat.

He said the point of the law is to prevent the Polish nation as a whole from being wrongly accused of institutionalized participation in the Holocaust. He recalled that the Polish government at the time had to go into exile and Polish officials were those who struggled to inform the world that the Germans were putting Jews to death on Polish soil.

“No, there was no systemic way in which Poles took part in it,”

Duda said.

The bill first was proposed about two years ago, soon after Law and Justice took power in 2015, but hadn’t been an issue of public debate recently. Many people were surprised when lawmakers suddenly approved it on Jan. 26, the day before International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Jan Grabowski, a historian at the University of Ottawa in Canada who studies Polish violence against Jews during the war, called Duda’s signing of the law

“further proof that the nationalists now in power in Poland will do anything to cater to the hard, right-wing core of their electorate.”

“Unfortunately, it is not only the nationalists but also the whole Polish society which will have to pay the price,”

said Grabowski, who is also a member of the Polish Center for Holocaust Research in Warsaw.

Like in Germany we should know that not all people agreed with what was happening and that not all Poles behaved indecently during German occupation. The Polish people shall have to recognise that there may have been a small criminal underclass, who were especially visible in small towns, like we shall have to see that their guilt cannot be put on the nation as a whole and that there also have been several Polish people who fought valiantly against the Nazis.

Poland’s chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich, told CNN on Tuesday February 20, that the fallout from the new law has been so fierce it has left many members of the Jewish community wondering if they are still welcome in Poland.

Schudrich said the open letter was not a political move but more of an opportunity to show how the community is feeling.

“This is one of the most devastating effects of the past few weeks,”

Schudrich said.

‘It is devastating that such questions are asked and speaks to the fragility of the situation. It’s not just the new law but the tone of the discussion with almost no reaction from leadership to that tone. A deafening silence by the leadership.”

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Additional reading

Declaration of the Polish Associations for Jewish Studies and for Yiddish Studies concerning recent legislation on the Institute for National Remembrance

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Further related

1. The Rightwing Polish
2. Neo-Nazis in the Mainstream?
3. Facebook like a Facistbook
4. Anti-Semitism in Poland in part of a larger European problem
5. Polish Jews stunned, scared by eruption of anti-Semitism
6. Poland’s Problem
7. Polish Prime Minister: Jews Also Perpetrated Holocaust
8. Podgórze: Below the hill and through the ghetto
9. Jewish Warsaw in the Shadow of Skyscrapers
10. Crossing Boarders
11. Holocaust Remembrance Day in Włocławek
12. Polish Government Freezes Controversial Holocaust Law
13. Poland’s Jewish groups say Jews feel unsafe since new Holocaust law
14. Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland
15. Poland’s Jews fear for future under new Holocaust law
16. Israel pushes back against Polish proposal that rejects culpability for Holocaust
17. Israel pushes back against Polish proposal that rejects culpability for Holocaust (2 – English News, LTEshare)
18. Israel pushes back against Polish proposal that rejects culpability for Holocaust (3 – at Lonely blogging)

Quiz questions, views, left- and right-wing anti-Semitism

An Orthodox Christian got confronted by a friend who recently posted a link to an article on anti-Semitism which claimed that anti-Semitism of the left was more dangerous than anti-Semitism of the right. He found the article biased and tendentious for several reasons and writes

For one thing, the author seemed to characterise “the Left” in much the same way that antisemites characterise the Jews — with stereotypes based on innuendoes. Just as for antisemites there is no need to substantiate any accusations against “the Jews”, so for those authors there is no need to substantiate any allegations against “the Left”, because those are something that “everyone knows”.

Anti-semitism from which site it may come in whatever country it may be uttered is also something which is wrong and should not be accepted. the writer of the article may have been writing about the “the Left” in the American sense, which means still a very conservative group, because the left for Americans can be a group which belongs to the Democrats.

Steve Hayes aged 9

The writer of Khanya, Steve Hayes considers himself a a liberal who believes that theological liberalism leads to political conservatism and vice versa. According to him there is primary an ascetic struggle as part of the training and discipline we need in order to engage in other aspects of the struggle. {Thoughts on Spiritual Warfare (synchroblog)}

The primary aspect of spiritual warfare, therefore, is the struggle against the passions leading to theosis (divinisation, godliness). {Thoughts on Spiritual Warfare (synchroblog)}

When we look at today’s society we can see al lot of ungodliness and it is just because so many people are so far away from God’s rules that there are so many problems in this world.

Soon after seeing the anti-Semitism article, someone posted one of those quizzes on Facebook that purport to show whether you are left or right. Hayes questions

Is it accurate? I don’t know, but I thought it would be interesting to do it to see what the quiz authors regarded as “left” or “right” characteristics, which can itself be revealing of social trends.

Funny to see I had exactly the same result as him, getting following result:

Your political views:

You can take the test here,and compare your results with ours.

I can assure you I am not for Tax-increases but I am for a better distribution of wealth and a better differentiation for the wages and a better performance related pay.

Hayes is anti-war, anti-abortion and anti-capital punishment and writes

Most of those who claim to be pro-life are less than solidly so, and are rather full-of-holes pro-life. If you want a more accurate test to take your political temperature, try the Political Compass.

Having tried it myself it showed my Political Compass

Economic Left/Right: -6.13
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -4.67

My position plotted against the UK parties in the 2015 general election would be

which I think would not be a bad picture.

Hayes remarks

Be that as it may, very few of the characteristics ascribed to the left, either in the test or in the antisemitism article, appeared directly in the quiz questions. There was nothing about intersectionality (whatever that may be) or “identity politics” (which sounds like a pretty right-wing thing to me). But there were quite a lot of questions about Christian values. One of a group of four that I opted for was “kindness”, because it came closest to the Christian value of love, though whether the test counted that as “left” or “right” I’m not sure, but I noticed that it does place the Christian value of forgiveness on the left. {Anti-Semitism, anti-leftism and anti-Christianity}

I consider Jesus a “communist avant la lettre” and have seen several tests where the agapè love is considered to be “leftish”. The Christian value of forgiveness is also many times placed on the left.

Though what shocks me and troubles me a lot is that several people in the U.S.A. who call themselves “Christian” or “Born again Christian” have not much feeling for other people and or not much interested in sharing with those around them. Many of them oppose anything what has a smell of socialism or systems where is demanded that people help each other or provide money in a fund or system like Obama Care to help others. Lots of those so called Christians have also a very averse attitude to true or non-trinitarian Christians, Jews and Muslims. All that worship the Only One True God and not their Trinity seem to be people they would like to see to “burn in hell”.

Clearly when hearing lots of North Americans talking on the little screen, they give an impression all those who do not belong to their Christendom are disgusting people which should be thrown out of the country. Some have such weird ideas about other faiths that we in Europe can wonder if they did not learn about them in their schools and if the media does not give any good advice. Looking at some TV-station , like Fox, we see lots of de-information and no objective information.

In the American media we see a lot of anti-black racism and a lot of Islamophobia, plus the choice of many to consider those with a “white” skin (I would say an light tainted orange skin) superior to those with an other coloured skin. As such the Jew comes into the picture as well, having not the Caucasian looks. Jews all over the world comes in all shades — from blonde to black. In Israel the conflict between Jews and Palestinians isn’t about race. Nor are the tensions between Jews from Europe and those from the Muslim world — though activists and academics sometimes import the terms “black” and “white,” in defiance of their lying eyes. But on many American platforms the looks of the Jews bring sayings against them which I would prefer not to hear in a civilised country.

Already in the preparation for the previous American election we could find several lies about Obama his origin and birthplace. This was for us already an indication that there was more brewing and that a significant portion of Americans felt horror that an Afro-American could become president.

Race is the most pervasive reason that some Americans believe they can discriminate against and despise others. When you see certain Jews their body clearly shows certain marks, which are good enough a sign for those so called Christians to call them murderers of Jesus and to hate them.

Some may think anti-Semitism just isn’t as bad as other forms of racism, but it is. Worse is it when there is an attitude of

Jews don’t count as a group worth protecting.

Jonathan Taubes, a student activist at Binghamton University who worked with progressive campaigns in Binghamton, on and off campus, writes

Jewish people face bigotry in this country, and the history of institutional anti-Semitism here is real, but today we find ourselves mostly free of persecution. We should recognize that privilege and use it to fight for the vulnerable. {Dear Allies, Don’t Downplay Anti-Semitism in Trump’s America}

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) showed at the beginning of this year that the number of anti-Semitic incidents remained significantly higher in 2017 compared to 2016. In addition to the significant bump in the first quarter of this year, there was also a distinct increase after the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., in August.
Since 1979, ADL has counted anti-Semitic incidents in the U.S. and reported the numbers in its annual Audit of Anti-Semitic Incidents. It can be said that also in the U.S.A. the amount of injustices to Jews became too high. New York State (267 incidents); California (197); Massachusetts (117); Florida (69) and Pennsylvania (58) incidents of crimes against Jews for their race.

In August, ADL recorded a “meta-event” rarely seen in America: the white supremacist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., which featured shocking and violent expressions of anti-Semitism and racism, including the display of swastika flags, chants of “Jews will not replace us!” and other overt anti-Semitic acts.

There seems such a fear that they would replaced by Jews and Muslims or that their world would become Islamic. Though then why do they not question their own religion and their own religious members. In case they would be strong believers there should be no fear that they would leave their faith. When they are standing strong in their faith they should even be able to come to witness to Muslims and Jews and have them to come to Christianity.

Anti-Semitic incidents spiked on and immediately following Charlottesville. Of the 306 incidents reported in Q3, 221 took place on or after the August 11 rally.

The Charlottesville rally was one of at least 33 public white supremacist events in the U.S. so far this year, which were supplemented with 188 incidents where white supremacists used fliers to spread their message to new audiences, especially on college campuses.

Police departments and human rights groups across the United States of America and all over Europe show that there is a dramatically rise in anti-Semitic hate crimes. When the president’s chief counterterrorism advisor, Sebastian Gorka, was found to support a violent anti-Semitic militia in his parents’ native Hungary, there showed a situation where the left talks about white supremacy as if Jews aren’t affected and anti-Semitism is just a distraction from real issues – when, in fact, anti-Semitism is at the core of the white supremacist ideologies today’s leftist movements seek to upend.

The anti-Semitism article Hayes encountered, also has a significant comment on the Christian worldview — How Anti-Semitism’s True Origin Makes It Invisible To The Left – The Forward:

In addition to the belief in a shadowy group with the power to affect large-scale outcomes, conspiracy theories also reflect a worldview in which reality is the product of a timeless and cosmic struggle between good and evil. These kinds of dualistic narratives are especially enticing to groups that view themselves to be under existential duress, and as Elaine Pagels has shown, this has profoundly shaped Western culture. Jews under Roman occupation and early Christians under Jewish ostracism and gentile persecution developed theologies of the oppressed in which the devil and his demonic host squared off with God and his angels.

Hayes believes that there is a cosmic struggle between good and evil,

though I’m not sure that it is timeless. The Christian take on it is that in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ the decisive battle was won by good, and we live in the last days of mopping up operations.

That we live in a time close to the end-times we may see in the signs given in the bible, which we can recognise clearly. But that should not have to mean we should let everything happen like it goes now.

Hayes thinks that

Western Christianity tends to be legalistic, to share the values of the Right rather than the Left, preferring punishment to forgiveness, and justice to kindness (in the left-right quiz mentioned above).

but than he forgets to see what real Christians preach.The real lovers of God recognise what the Nazarene Jew has done and do now that there is no such place as a hell to torture people for ever. Real Christians keep to the bible teachings and not to the human doctrines and human fear-mongering to have their flock under control. though Hayes recognises the appalling falsehoods that several Christian denominations

smack of perversity even to attack its perverseness.[1] And the conclusion is altogether evil. {Love the sinner, hate the sin}

For him is in his Orthodox theology the Church a hospital where sinners can be healed rather than a courtroom where they are to be judged. He should know that it is also in other Christian denominations, like the Christadelphians for example. In the Christadelphian faith it is even so that we consider no man to judge others, except those in function as judge, but still it being up to Jesus to give the end verdict.

He rightly says

if we are Christians we must love the sinner but hate the sin.

We must

• Love the oppressor but hate oppression

• Love the corrupt politician and businessman, but hate corruption

• Love the warmonger but hate war

• Love the exploiter but hate exploitation

and I would add that we should protect all those who have no voice and should come up for all those who are discriminated or done wrong.

Lest it seems that Hayes is saying that the line between good and evil runs between Eastern and Western Christianity, making “us” superior to “them”, he quotes a Western Christian, G.K. Chesterton, on this:

The whole case for Christianity is that a man who is dependent upon the luxuries of this life is a corrupt man, spiritually corrupt, politically corrupt, financially corrupt.

There is one thing that Christ and all the Christian saints have said with a sort of savage monotony. They have said simply that to be rich is to be in peculiar danger of moral wreck. It is not demonstrably un-Christian to kill the rich as violators of definable justice. It is not demonstrably un-Christian to crown the rich as convenient rulers of society. It is not certainly un-Christian to rebel against the rich or to submit to the rich. But it is quite certainly un-Christian to trust the rich, to regard the rich as more morally safe than the poor.

A Christian may consistently say,

“I respect that man’s rank, although he takes bribes.”

But a Christian cannot say, as all modern men are saying at lunch and breakfast,

“a man of that rank would not take bribes.”

For it is a part of Christian dogma that any man in any rank may take bribes. It is a part of Christian dogma; it also happens by a curious coincidence that it is a part of obvious human history. When people say that a man “in that position” would be incorruptible, there is no need to bring Christianity into the discussion. Was Lord Bacon a bootblack? Was the Duke of Marlborough a crossing sweeper? In the best Utopia, I must be prepared for the moral fall of any man in any position at any moment; especially for my fall from my position at this moment.

Jews In France Ponder Whether To Stay Or To Leave

“French-Jewish families are being forced from their homes in Paris suburbs as Europe continues to be convulsed by levels of anti-Semitism not seen since the end of the Second World War.

Rue Gabriel Péri, a pedestrian zone in Saint-Denis, in 2012.

The Paris commuter newspaper 20 Minutes documents an “internal exodus” during 2017 of Jews from the Seine-Saint-Denis department, saying

“it is emblematic of broader concerns that French Jews, like their brothers and sisters across Europe, are finding it increasingly difficult to reconcile their faith with the changing demographics of the continent.”

Who would ever have thought that after the lessons of World War 2 we’d see this sort of thing in Europe again. Well, we are, and we may not do if our node bleeds, or turn our heads when a car drives over the pavement to hit Jewish pedestrians, or have our ears shut when people shout

“Dirty Jews, You’re going to die!”

 

The third largest Jewish community in the world has seen growing anti-Semitism in France since the 2000s. Increasingly, the Jewish community in France no longer feels safe. The most salient events were the murder of Ilan Halimi in 2006, the attack on a Jewish school in Toulouse in 2012 and the attack on the Hypercasher in Paris in 2015. These three events alone accounted for the murder of nine Jews, including three children who were murdered at close range.

In 2014, there were 851 antisemitic acts of violence in France as recorded by the Protection Service of the Jewish Community.  Indeed, some Jews in their private lives in France have given up wearing their kippa or the Star of David for fear of insults or aggression. This video from 2015 shows the kind of intimidation a Jew can face depending on what part of Paris they walk through.

The Aliyah In Israel 

The growing antagonism towards them has led some French Jews to make the drastic decision to leave the country.

For several decades now, Jews in France have been leaving for Israel. The attacks of 2015 doubled the figure of departures, which is now about 6,000 to 7,000 per year. Following the 2015 attacks, Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu traveled to Paris, and while there did not miss the opportunity to mention that Israel was open to French Jews. The president of the Jewish Agency for Israel went further, stating that there was “no future for Jews in France.”

Read more

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Preceding articles

Dr. Miller looking at Jews in France

Apocalyptic Extremism: No Longer a Laughing Matter

Anti-Semitic pressure driving Jews out of Europe

Growing anti-Semitism possible sign of certain times

What to do in the Face of Global Anti-semitism

Geen groeiende moslimhaat in Europa, maar groeiende jodenhaat

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Additional reading

1. Religious Practices around the world
2. Who is a Jew?

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Further related

1. The Rise of Anti-Seminism
2. If you’re going to be a hater, make sure you’ve done your homework.
3. French Jews will have to give up Israeli citizenship, says Le Pen
4. French Jews imagine life under Marine Le Pen
5. Israel’s New Cultural War of Aggression
6. Redefining Anti-Semitism – An Effort To Silence Criticism Of israel

Growing anti-Semitism possible sign of certain times

The last five years there was a lot to do about immigrants but also in West Europe several people started showing more hate against Jews and Muslims. The right wing movements have been growing stronger the last decade and many are not afraid tocome on the streets to tell their disgust about Jews and Muslims.

After the Holocaust, in which some six million Jews were exterminated in Nazi occupied Europe between 1942 and 1945 under the National Socialist regime of Adolf Hitler one would think no such hate against Jews would arise. But the formation of the state of Israel in 1948 soon  created new antisemitic tensions in the Middle East. In West Europe it was considered at the beginning of the 21st century to exist only on the margins of society. Our present day situation, having to notice more acts against the Jewish people has us to see that anti-semitism is growing again as if the 1930ies did not happen. The prejudice against, the hatred of, or the discrimination against Jews as an ethnic, religious, or racial group, and is widely recognized as a form of racism is back again.

Today we should have the words of Moses in our mind

Deuteronomy 28:37 OJB And thou shalt become an object of horror, a mashal, and a byword, among kol haGoyim whither Hashem shall lead thee.

The name of Jew has long been a proverbial mark of detestation and contempt among all the nations whither they have been dispersed, and is so to this day, whether among Christians, Mohmammedans, or Pagans.

Zechariah 8:13 OJB And it shall come to pass, that as ye were a kelalah (curse) among the Goyim, O Bais Yehudah, and Bais Yisroel; so will I save you, and ye shall be a berakhah; fear not, but let your hands be strong.

Lots of people who call themselves Christian do forget that their lord Jesus Christ was a Jew. They also should see or should have to know that all nations who now worship the true God, and receive the Sacred Scriptures as His word, have derived the whole of their divine knowledge, under God, from Jewish prophets, apostles, and teachers. That the Saviour in whom all nations shall be blessed, sprang from that favoured race, emphatically explains what is meant that they shall be a blessing. The full accomplishment of this prediction in Zecharia, however, is probably reserved for the future restoration of the Jews, which for sure shall come.

On account of what we can see now we would not have much to believe that the Jews are such a blessed people. As in the old times Israel was entering a very dangerous environment in Canaan and needed strong warnings against yielding to the temptations she would encounter, we should see the many warnings in Scripture also for today. We do know we can’t avoid the suffering people try to bring over us. It is known from Scriptures that Israel would suffer physical distresses, and that her enemies would plunder and oppress her. As freedom from Egypt came to epitomize God’s grace in the past, so return to Egyptian conditions represented His judgment and now in the time that many Jews come to live in the Promised Land, others may come to hate their divine position.

The people in ancient times were commanded, when they should come into possession of the Promised Land, to erect two pillars (probably suggesting the permanency and authority of the Law) and an altar, for sacrifice and propitiation in case of failure to keep God’s law (Deuteronomy 27:1-8).  When looking at the present Jewish state we notice that there are several non-religious Jews who go in against the Laws of God. They know and consider Israel as their Promised Land, but they forget the conditions for them being allowed to be resident in it.

The elohim has it about “foreigners” or “strangers” living on this globe, we having to know as lovers of God we would be “aliens” for those of this world. So it can be idle hope to think goyim would come to be willing to accept us and to have our faith in One true God respected.

The growing xenophobia we can see for us can also be sign which we may not ignore as a sign of coming end-times. Because we can see the augmentation of earthquakes and tsunamis as well as the increase of people setting others against others, religions against religions.

The rising fixation with Jewish power in our time has unwittingly revealed Jewish emasculation instead. Jews do not control the discourse; rather, the discourse controls them.

is said by the Community Security Trust (CST) which works across the Jewish community, from the most religious to the most secular, young to old, across the political spectrum and throughout the whole of the UK.

In their aim to bring more hate against the Jewish people we find people who are not afraid to bring false news, like telling that that Boris Yeltsin and Mikhail Gorbachev were both assumed names and that the men had been born Baruch Yeltzer and Mikhail Solomonovich Gorbachev (his real patronymic is Sergeyevich). In other words, the architects of Russian misery after the collapse of the Soviet Union were secret Jews, according some.

This was outlandish even by the standards of eastern European antisemitism. It was also hypermarginal in the media. You had to buy pamphlets on the street to read about plots to dilute the purity of the Russian race by a cabal of Jews/Zionists (the two words were interchangeable). Then came the internet. These days you are never more than a couple of clicks away from weapons-grade antisemitism.

writes the political columnist Rafael Behr in the Guardian.

But it still comes as a shock when one of the oldest and most versatile themes of the genre – the Jewish financier, dandling politicians on puppet strings, coordinating events in the shadows – finds its way on to the front page of a national British newspaper.

And that way not only the English newspaper The Daily Telegraph create a possible subtext which certain people misuse to contaminate the Jewish name.

Following the article’s publication on Thursday February the 8th, Theresa May’s former chief of staff, Nick Timothy was accused of anti-Semitism in the front-page exclusive he co-authored, and which RT UK along with many other national outlets picked up.

George Soros(L) , Nick Timothy(R) -© AFP / Global Look Press

The article outlines how Soros, described by the Telegraph as the “man who broke the Bank of England” in reference to the fortune he made betting against the sterling in the 1990s, is attempting to undermine the Tory government by donating £400,000 (US$560,000) to pro-EU group Best for Britain. The group is campaigning for a second referendum on the final Brexit deal agreed between Parliament and the EU.

The accusations of anti-Semitism were made by Guardian columnist Owen Jones, academic Bonnie Greer and King’s College professor Jonathan Portes, among others. Portes drew a response from Timothy when he asked if he and the right-wing paper were really endorsing “anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.”

Jewish Chronicle editor Stephen Pollard highlighted the controversial implications of using the phrase “secret plot.”

Telegraph story is disturbing because of the use of the idea it’s a “secret plot.” Soros is incredibly open about what he does. Say it’s wrong; fine. But idea it’s a secret plot is exactly the line being used in Hungary and elsewhere precisely because he is Jewish.

James Ball writes

This needs saying clearly: baiting people on George Soros conspriacy theories is a tactic currently being used by would-be autocrats and anti-Semitic groups across the world.
Theresa May and Conservative MPs should distance themselves from this tactic, and fast. https://twitter.com/markdistef/sta

This was just one incident in Great-Britain, where the Jewish community was targeted at a rate of nearly four times a day last year, according to statistics from the Community Security Trust (CST), a charity that monitors antisemitism, which recorded 1,382 antisemitic incidents nationwide in 2017.

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Additional reading

1. The right-wing press have shot their bolt over Corbyn and are now at a loss what to do
2. Antisemitic hate crimes hit record high as violent assaults increase by more than a third in a year
3. Opinion It’s Not anti-Semitism if You Just Hate the Bad Jews
4. Were There Actually ‘Jewish Perpetrators’ of the Holocaust?
5. James O’Brien: Telegraph’s Soros Story Looks Like Rise Of Anti-Semitism – Video
6. George Soros: The billionaire investor who became the favourite target of conspiracy theories and antisemitic hatred
7. Arthur Jones: Holocaust denier set to become Republican nominee for Illinois congressional seat
8. Soros’s Forced Migration of Muslims Into Europe: Eradicate Patriotism and Cause Worldwide Anti Semitism
9. Anti-Semitism in Goa? Some Reflection
10. Max Blumenthal: US is Arming Neo-Nazis in Ukraine
11. Anti-semitism
12. When is “anti-Semitism” NOT anti-Semitism?
13. The Expanding Umbrella of Anti-Semitism
14. New anti-Semitism Row as Nasreen Khan Selected as Labour Council Candidate.
15. Migrants expressing anti-Semitism in Germany could face deportation – reports
16. Ken Livingstone and anti-semitism
17. Anti-Semitism, anti-leftism and anti-Christianity
18. The Alt-Right, Collectivism and Why Everyone’s Asking the Wrong Questions
19. Blatant Anti-Semitism In 2018 In Russia Insider
20. Race Relations Commissioner Devoy on anti-Semitism
21. Vivian Bercovici: Dear Mr. Ambassador, why is Canada funding anti-Semitism?
22. German protests prompt fears of rising anti-Semitism — Spectre of German anti-Semitism is beginning to re-emerge
23. #We Remember
24. how “anti-Semitism” is used
25. Why isn’t anti-Semitism as reviled as “Islamophobia” or anti-black racism?
26. ” the enlightenment “
27. Anti-Semitic hate speech incidents in Austria at all-time high, watchdog says