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Life Is Intolerable for Jews In Europe, Assemblyman Says
Following a recent fact-finding trip to Europe, a Democrat who represents Boro Park in the state Assembly, Dov Hikind, said yesterday he is convinced that anti-Semitism has made life intolerable for Jews in England, France, Germany, and Belgium.
While Western European Jews would likely fail to qualify as persecuted refugees under State Department standards, America has made rare exceptions for certain groups in the past, including Jews and other religious minorities in the former Soviet Union who qualified as refugees under the 1989 Lautenberg Amendment. Mr. Hikind wants this treatment extended to Western European Jews. At least one major Jewish organization is already opposing Mr. Hikind's plan. The director of international Jewish affairs at the American Jewish Committee, Rabbi Andrew Baker, said yesterday life is now improving for Jewish communities in Europe following a "resurgence of anti-Semitism" in 2002. "I think while community leaders would not dismiss that there is a problem, they would agree that the solution to the problem is not emigration," Mr. Baker said. He cited France as an example of positive change: Its new president, Nicolas Sarkozy, has publicly committed to combating anti-Semitism. "I think it seriously disturbed French Jewry, maybe more than just the incidents themselves, the sense that the government would not address it," Mr. Baker said. "Now you have a government saying that we can't excuse these issues. Even if the numbers of incidents are not equally reflecting that change, that's a dramatic change in their minds." Mr. Hikind described recent reports on anti-Semitic incidents in European countries as "staggering." He pointed to a Tel Aviv University study on worldwide anti-Semitism published in 2006 that described a marked increase in incidents against Jews in Europe in the last year, including twice as many acts of violence against Jew in Belgium than the previous year, and reported anti-Semitic incidents "on an almost daily basis" in Germany, mostly in the form of verbal harassment. In July, the Anti-Defamation League published a survey describing increasingly negative attitudes toward Jews in Western Europe. In England, 50% of those surveyed said they believed Jews were more loyal to Israel than to their own country, versus 38% in the previous year. An organization that records anti-Semitic acts in Britain, the Community Security Trust, said it recorded a 31% rise in incidents over the last year, to 594 in 2006 from 455 in 2005. State Department officials could not be reached for comment Posted by: lotp 2007-12-04 |
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