World News in Brief

JTA

The results of the survey, carried out this year by the IFOP (Institut français d’opinion publique) for the American Jewish Committee, were published on Tuesday in Le Parisien.

In addition to the 23% of respondents who said they had experienced an assault, 64% said they had experienced a non-physical anti-Semitic incident.

In France, home to about 500 000 Jews, authorities documented 541 anti-Semitic incidents in 2018, suggesting a prevalence of one anti-Semitic incident per about 1 000 Jews.

Forty-three percent of respondents younger than 35 said they felt threatened in their daily lives. A third of respondents said they avoided wearing items in public that identified them as Jews, including a kippah. An even larger proportion – 37% – said they avoided installing a mezuzah on their door.

Pope condemns ‘barbaric resurgence’ of anti-Semitism

A week before International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Pope Francis renewed his condemnation of anti-Semitism, decrying its “barbaric resurgence”.

Francis was addressing a delegation from the Simon Wiesenthal Center at the Vatican on Monday.

International Holocaust Remembrance Day is observed in Italy and throughout the world on 27 January – the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz Nazi death camp in 1945.

“If we lose our memory, we annihilate the future,” the pope said. “May the anniversary of the unspeakable cruelty that humanity learned 75 years ago serve as a summons to pause, to be silent, and to remember.”

Francis said the world was witnessing a troubling resurgence of factionalism and populism, which provides a breeding ground for hatred.

“We must commit ourselves to tilling the soil in which hatred grows, sowing peace in it,” he said.

The pope also encouraged deeper Christian-Jewish co-operation.

Student claims Anne Frank didn’t die in camp

The progressive NowThis news website removed a segment of a video in which a George Washington University student asserted that teenage Holocaust diarist Anne Frank didn’t die in a concentration camp.

The six-minute video about President Donald Trump’s executive order signed last month – that directs “robust” enforcement of existing civil-rights protections for Jews on campus – criticised Trump for “defining what is and what isn’t being Jewish”, and said it was a “veiled way to silence Palestinian voices” against Israel. The order says attackers target Jews since they perceive them to be a race or having a shared national identity.

Becca Lewis, who says she is Jewish, made the false claim while speaking to two Palestinian students at the school in Washington DC.

“What’s going to happen if there’s another Holocaust? Well, we’re seeing what’s happening. We’re seeing people die at the border for lack of medical care. That’s how Anne Frank died. She didn’t die in a concentration camp, she died from typhus,” Lewis says in the now-deleted video segment.

Frank died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in February or March 1945, probably of typhus.

Critics called Lewis a Holocaust denier.

Jewish driver in Berlin points to bullying

A Jewish man working as a driver for the German Chancellery in Berlin has reported being subjected to anti-Semitic harassment.

An unnamed source told the daily Bild am Sonntag newspaper that the man, who comes from Lebanon and worked in the chancellery’s motor pool, reported that several colleagues had insulted and bullied him since early 2019, calling him “Jewish pig” and “Kanake”, a word referring to migrants from primarily Muslim countries or southern Europe.

The employee has reported the incidents to Felix Klein, the federal government’s anti-Semitism commissioner in the ministry of the interior, according to the newspaper.

While confirming basic details, a government spokesperson told Bild that no further comment could be provided in the confidential matter. The employee reportedly now works in a new location, away from his former colleagues.

PA newspaper calls for violent disruption of Holocaust event

The Palestinian Authority’s official newspaper called for violence against Israelis in an effort to disrupt the World Holocaust Forum being held this week in Jerusalem.

A columnist for Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, in an article over the weekend, said that Israel was planning a ceremony to memorialise Jews killed in Europe even as “the Palestinian holocaust by Israel” is ignored.

“One shot will disrupt the ceremony, and one dead body will cancel the ceremony,” Yahya Rabah wrote in an article published on Saturday, according to Palestinian Media Watch.

In a statement, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organisations condemned the article, saying, “Such a call for violence can never be justified, but it’s especially repugnant for the PA to incite terrorism deliberately aimed at disrupting an occasion as solemn and significant as this.”

Israel’s Channel 13 television reported that the Israeli military said it would launch airstrikes in response to any attacks, even if international dignitaries were in the country.