Europe sees rise in anti-Semitism

PARIS — For the past four years — as friends erased "Dirty Jew" graffiti from their office plaques and her French-born daughter puzzled over "go back where you belong" comments from strangers on the street — Evelyne Chiche has spent a piece of each day wondering if she was living in the wrong country.

This spring, the 62-year-old Jewish radio host plans to move to Miami. "I think it's important for my grandchildren here that I move, to provide them with a safe place should they need to get away," she said, waiting until a nearby businessman left the restaurant before talking about being Jewish. "France has changed."

Today, 27 world leaders — a king and queen, presidents and prime ministers — will gather in Poland to mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp, where 1 million people, mostly Jews, were murdered.

But as the world focuses on the past, an increasing number of European Jews are concerned, to quote Sammy Ghozlan, a retired Calais police chief who now investigates anti-Semitic crimes, that "After decades of peace, the old taboos against anti-Semitism are broken. There is no future here for a Jew."

Nobody maintains that Europe is again suffering the kind of hatred that gave rise to Auschwitz and other death camps that claimed 6 million Jews in Adolf Hitler's mad rush to his "final solution" to the "Jewish problem."

But the rise in anti-Semitism, chronicled in upward trends of European reports on attacks and threats against Jews, has prompted open concern in a continent whose history, from the Spanish Inquisition and medieval ghettos to the Dreyfus affair and Hitler's rise, is riven with attacks on Jews.

In the past few months a Jewish school has been firebombed in suburban Paris, Jewish gravestones have been painted with swastikas in Germany, France and Russia, and Jews have been verbally abused, spat on and beaten in England and France.

Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, an international Jewish human-rights organization, calls the wave of violence "the largest onslaught against European synagogues and Jewish schools since Kristallnacht," the night in 1938 when Nazi sympathizers stormed the shops and homes of Jews throughout Germany, smashing property and beating people. Nearly 100 Jews were killed.

This week, leaders throughout Europe have taken pains to use the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz as a pledge not to forget or repeat the atrocities.

Still, Deidre Berger, the director of the American Jewish Council in Berlin, admits to an eerie feeling as she tracks studies from around the continent that show rising attacks and threats against Jews. She speaks in an office that's protected by three sets of security doors.

"The medieval stereotypes of Jews — controlling, bloodthirsty, vengeful, unscrupulous — are back," she said.

Why anti-Semitism is growing is open to debate.

Ghozlan, who grew up in the Paris suburbs and founded an organization to track anti-Semitic attacks, traces the rise to the Palestinian uprising against Israel that began four years ago. He also thinks that part of the rise is demographic: Arab immigrants now make up about 10 percent of the French population.

Berger echoed Ghozlan and other workers who track anti-Semitism across the continent in saying the Palestinian uprising had fueled anti-Semitism, particularly among leftist political parties.

What began as a pro-Palestinian movement turned into an anti-Israel movement then became anti-Jewish, she said.

"The left and the right of the political spectrum can't be divorced from the mainstream," she said. "When the center is so strongly anti-Israel, it gives license to the extremes."

Tracking anti-Semitism is complicated because each country has a different way of collecting statistics and a different way of defining an anti-Semitic crime.

Still, the trend seems clear. In Germany, according to statistics from the Federal Office for Internal Security, crimes "with an anti-Semitic background" grew from 817 in 1999 to 1,334 in 2002.

In Belgium, police recorded a 72 percent increase in anti-Semitic acts from 2000 to 2002, from 36 to 62.

Nowhere is the trend more visible than in France, where numbers from the Interior Ministry show that anti-Semitic acts — attacks and threats — reached a high of 1,513 in 2004, up from 593 the previous year. And Jewish groups say most anti-Semitic acts aren't reported.

Last year the number of French Jews immigrating to Israel rose by 15 percent, to about 2,400, according to Emmanuel Weintraub, executive-committee member for a coalition of Jewish groups in France.

While he's convinced the French government is working on the problem, concern is warranted.

"I equate today's problems to the anti-Semitism of 120 years ago," he said. "This is not progress. People everywhere are wondering if there is a Jewish future in Europe. The question is not easily answered."