Episodes range from boisterous attack, online slurs, dangers, spray painting, and actual attacks
Wednesday, November 01, 2023
Hatred of the Jewish community has seen an alarming rise worldwide since the October 7 attack by Hamas on southern Israel and the subsequent relentless bombing by Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip.
Incidents range from verbal abuse, online abuse, threats, graffiti and physical attacks. These actions often draw on anger over the conflict in Gaza and use it as a pretext for aggression against Jews.
Some reports suggest that countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom also saw an increase in Islamophobic incidents during this period. The heightened intensity of the conflict in Gaza and the trauma of October 7th have left many Jews feeling a heightened sense of fear and insecurity.
In countries where data are available, a clear pattern emerged. Hatred of the Jewish community has increased by 100% compared to the same period last year in places such as the United States, Britain, France, Germany and South Africa.
Most of these incidents consist of verbal abuse, online abuse, threats, graffiti and desecration of Jewish property, businesses or places of religious significance. A significant share is represented by physical attacks.
One common theme is that anger over the deaths of thousands of Palestinians as a result of Israel's bombing of Gaza is used as justification for verbal or physical aggression against Jews in general. This is often accompanied by the use of slurs and tropes rooted in a long history of hatred towards the Jewish community.
"This is the scariest time to be Jewish since World War II. We've had problems before, but it's never been this bad in my life," Anthony Adler, 62, said outside a synagogue in London's Golders Green district, a large Jewish community.
Adler, which operates three Jewish schools, temporarily closed two of them after Oct. 7 due to concerns about attacks on students and increased security at all three.
The climate of fear for many Jews is worse than in the previous surge of anti-Jewish hatred associated with the flare-up of violence in the Middle East, partly because of the intensity of the conflict in Gaza and partly because of the trauma of October 7.
"The idea that Israel was the ultimate refuge, that idea is destroyed by what happened on October 7," said political scientist Nonna Mayer, a member of France's CNCDH, an independent human rights commission.
The most chilling incident worldwide was the attack on an airport in Russia's Dagestan on Sunday by an angry mob looking for Jews to harm after arriving from Tel Aviv. In response, Rabbi Alexander Boroda, president of the Russian Federation of Jewish Communities, said that anti-Israel sentiment had turned into open aggression against Russian Jews.
Shneor Segal, the chief Ashkenazi rabbi of Azerbaijan, said the incident showed that "anti-Semites will use any excuse - the current crisis in the Middle East is the latest - to terrorize the dwindling number of us who remain" in the Caucasus. "And where do they think they will drive those Jews? The very country whose existence is such an abomination to them!" he said, referring to Israel.
But without going to such extremes, a number of incidents around the world show the fears and tensions affecting Jewish communities. In Buenos Aires, students at a well-known Jewish school were asked not to wear their usual uniforms to make them less identifiable, parents said.
Other schools canceled planned camps and activities outside their premises. At Cornell University in upstate New York, security has been increased around the Center for Jewish Life after online threats, including calls for it to be bombed.
