Tablet(http://www.tabletmag.com)
Nearly 25% of European Jews Afraid to Be Jewish
67 percent say reporting anti-Semitic incidents to authorities is ineffectual, 16 October 2013
by Yair Rosenberg
An expansive new survey by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights has found that nearly a quarter of European Jews fear to openly identify as Jewish, including 50 percent of Swedish Jews, 40 percent of French Jews and 36 percent of Belgian Jews. And this is only one of the study’s shocking discoveries. Similarly disturbing, 37 percent of Romanian Jews, 35 percent of Hungarian Jews, 31 percent of Belgian Jews, and 21 percent of British and Swedish Jews, reported experiencing anti-Semitism in the past year.
Perhaps the most distressing finding was this one noted by JTA:
More than 75 percent of respondents said they do not report anti-Semitic harassment to police and 64 percent said they do not report physical assaults, with 67 percent saying that reporting incidents was either “not worth the effort” or otherwise ineffectual.
These new findings, coupled with sustained efforts to ban circumcision and kosher slaughter, paint a grim portrait of Jewish life in Europe, just over 65 years after the horrors of the Holocaust. Whether they will provoke any soul-searching among the European Union countries that commissioned the survey remains to be seen.
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