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A Quarter Of European Jewish Community Leaders Say They’ve Considered Emigrating Amid Concerns About Growing Antisemitism

By Cnaan Liphshiz

Jewish immigrants moving to Israel get off the plane at Ben Gurion Airport near Tel

Aviv in 2020. (Jewish Agency for Israel) (JTA) — A survey of Jewish community leaders in Europe found that 23% said they were considering emigrating.

That figure is unchanged since the last time the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee conducted its regular survey of European Jewish sentiment three years ago.

But the JDC survey found that European Jewish leaders, especially in Western Europe, are increasingly concerned about antisemitism, which for the first time since 2008 topped respondents’ rankings of concerns for their communities.

It also found that European Jewish leaders say they feel less connected to communities across the continent than they have in the past and that they are more concerned about poverty in their own communities.

Only 3% of the leaders surveyed said they had made active preparations to leave Europe and 67% said they had not considered emigrating at all. Another 8% did not answer the question.

Of the Jewish community leaders who said they had contemplated leaving, roughly two thirds said they would make aliyah, or immigrate to Israel.

The survey did not ask respondents their reasons for contemplating emigrating. But it is clear from their responses that European Jewish leaders are increasingly concerned about antisemitism and security.

More than two thirds of respondents said they expected antisemitism to increase in Europe over the next decade; only about half of respondents answered that way in 2008, the first time the survey was conducted. At the same time, 22% of respondents said they feel unsafe in their cities now, compared to 7% in 2008.

Concern was highest in Western Europe, where a spate of jihadist attacks on Jews over the last decade have contributed to increased immigration to Israel, particularly from France. In the years 2000 to 2010, fewer than 20,000 French Jews moved to Israel. But in the last decade, more than 40,000 have, a trend that surged after a jihadist murdered four Jews at a Jewish school in Toulouse in 2012, and surged again after another jihadist attack in 2015 left four Jews dead at a Paris kosher supermarket.

The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, which have hurt members’ income and communal cash makers such as museums, are also visible in the survey.

Poverty in the community, “though not one of the top threats, has grown steadily over the years, from 10% in 2008 to 35% in 2021,” the authors wrote. Some 37% of respondents marked financial hardship among members due to COVID-19 as a major threat to the community.

Efforts in several countries to ban the slaughter of animals for meat without stunning — a key factor in European efforts to curtail kosher slaughter — and non-medical male circumcision emerged for the first time as one of the top three greatest threats facing Jewish communities. Among respondents younger than 40, 26% said this was a very serious threat, as did 66% of older respondents.

Support for Israel has grown among respondents over previous polls. For example, 66% agreed this year with the statement “I support Israel fully, regardless of how its government behaves.” The same statement had a support rating of only 48% in 2015 and 57% in 2011.

But in keeping with trends detected outside Europe, respondents under 40 were less likely to agree with that statement and ranked support for Israel as the lowest among 18 communal priorities.

The survey included 1,054 respondents in 31 countries and was conducted in 10 languages About a third of respondents said they were Orthodox Jews, while a similar number characterized themselves as culturally Jewish. Nearly 60% were male and over 55 years old, reflecting the fact that the survey is of communal leaders; few Jews under 40 sit on communal organizations’ boards, according to the survey.ì

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How Moving To Denmark, A Country With Few Fellow Jews, Strengthened My Jewish Identity

By Rebecca Nachman This article originally appeared on Alma.

Copenhagen, Denmark. (Marco Bottigelli/Getty Images)

Growing up, one of my favorite books was “Number the Stars,” Lois Lowry’s middle-grade novel about Denmark’s effort to smuggle its Jewish citizens to Sweden during World War II. The operation, which saved 7,220 of Denmark’s 7,800 Jews, has been remarkable to me since I first read about it: while other European countries gave in to antisemitic propganda and followed Hitler’s rule, Denmark resisted. A common explanation today is that Danes didn’t see their Jewish neighbors as “others” — they were just as Danish as anyone else. Why wouldn’t they help their fellow Danskere?

Almost 80 years after the rescue of the Danish Jews, I moved to Copenhagen for grad school. Today, Denmark’s Jewish population stands at around 6,000 members, most of whom are congregated in the greater Copenhagen area. Coming from the Boston area, which is home to 248,000 Jews, and having attended Brandeis University, a historically Jewish college known for its robust Jewish population, landing in a country with such a small Jewish population was a big adjustment. But to my surprise, I preferred it.

Growing up, my family attended a Reform synagogue, I went to Jewish summer camp and Hebrew school, and I had a bat mitzvah — but the whole time, I felt like I was just going through the motions. At no point did I feel any sort of Jewish community, nor did I feel the need for one. Plenty of my friends and teachers were Jewish, my classmates knew about Jewish holidays, and there is no shortage of Jewish delis and Judaica stores in Greater Boston. Being Jewish wasn’t something I consciously thought about because it was so normalized in my setting.

But in Denmark, I’m often the first Jewish person someone has (knowingly) met. The Evangelical Lutheran Church is the national religion, but Denmark is overall an extremely atheistic country, with most people not being involved in any form of religious life. Here, I’ve had to make an effort to meet other Jews, and in doing so, I found an amazing Jewish community.

Despite Denmark’s small Jewish population, there’s an official Jewish community, Det Jødiske Samfund, a Jewish museum, an Orthodox synagogue, a Reform synagogue, a Chabad house, a Jewish elementary school, youth groups and an annual cultural festival There’s even a Jewish-Muslim biker club (yes, you read that right) that works to combat antisemitism and Islamophobia in Denmark and create mutual understanding between the two religious minorities. And this year, Copenhagen will host a gathering of Jewish young adults from all over Scandinavia. Whether it’s services at the Reform synagogue, challah baking at Chabad, or Shabbat dinner with the Jewish youth movement at the Great Synagogue, I’m never at a loss for Jewish events to attend.

I appreciate that the community isn’t strictly divided by denomination — I see the same familiar faces no matter which synagogue or organization I go to. While I never felt like I found my place in Greater Boston’s fragmented Jewish population, I immediately felt welcome in Jewish Denmark. When we’re such a small minority (only 0.1% of the population), the need for a community is more pressing. Having to deliberately seek out Jewish life has made the connections I’ve forged all the more special. Danish society is notoriously hard for foreigners to integrate into, but through the Jewish community I’ve been able to make Copenhagen feel like home.

Of course, this isn’t to say that being Jewish in Denmark is always idyllic. In 2014 the Jewish school was vandalized, and in 2015 a terrorist attacked the Great Synagogue. I personally haven’t experienced antisemitism here, but I know that my experience as a recent transplant is different from those of Jewish Danes who have spent their lives here, and from those who more clearly present as Jewish. That being said, I still feel significantly safer as a Jew here than I did in the U.S. (I have yet to hear a Dane compare vaccines to the Holocaust, baruch hashem).

I still think of “Number the Stars” often, especially when I’m at the same synagogue that the Jewish characters attended, or when I walk past a site that was mentioned in the book. I have no Danish heritage, so I’m not personally connected to the rescue of the Danish Jews. But, as schmaltzy as it sounds, I feel a sense of poetic beauty in finding a Jewish home in the same tiny Scandinavian country that came together to save thousands of us so many years ago.

Rebecca Nachman is Global Health master’s student at the University of Copenhagen.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.ì

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Jewish Festival’s Return To Russia’s Urals Region Is Cause For Celebration

By Larry Luxner

Russian Chief Rabbi Berel Lazar talks to participants during a session at Limmud FSU Volga-Urals, October 2021. (Ilya Shalman)

The last time Limmud FSU held a festival in Kazan, in 2016, hundreds of Jews from across the vast Volga-Urals region flocked to the event in Russia’s fifth-largest city.

Back then, the greatest obstacle to participation was geographic distance, yet some 600 people nevertheless turned up.

This month, Limmud FSU returned to Kazan for a three-day convention, but this time the challenges were quite different amid another wave of the coronavirus. Despite the pandemic concerns that prompted organizers to cap attendance at several hundred, there seemed no limit to participants’ enthusiasm for a Jewish celebration after nearly two years of social distancing in this historic city some 510 miles east of Moscow.

Under cold, crisp October skies, Russianspeaking Jews young and old gathered at a country retreat perched along the Volga River in the village of Borovoye Matyushino, about half an hour’s drive from Kazan, which is the capital of the Russian Republic of Tatarstan.

“This was our very first Limmud since 2016 and coronavirus,” said Limmud volunteer Katya Zueva, a professor of English and American literature at Kazan Federal University. “People were so happy that we finally managed to spend three days together, enjoying sessions, workshops, concerts and an amazing children’s program. And as a mother, I was really happy that my daughter, Elizaveta, was part of it.”

Dima Zicer leads a session on education at Limmud FSU Volga-Urals, October 2021. (Anna Ryasenskaya)

Zueva, 37, noted that Kazan is famous for its acceptance of different religions and ethnicities.

“We are an extremely tolerant region. In Kazan, there were never any signs of antisemitism,” she said, recalling how, in 2015, local Jewish, Muslim and Christian leaders showed up for the re-dedication of Kazan’s 100-year-old synagogue as part of an event organized by Limmud FSU.

Kazan, with 1.2 million inhabitants, is home to around 15,000 Jews, making it one of Russia’s largest Jewish communities outside of Moscow and St. Petersburg. Known for its vibrant mix of Tatar and Russian cultures, it was one of the host cities of the 2018 FIFA World Cup. In addition to the rededicated synagogue, Kazan is also home to the Center for Jewish Studies at Kazan Federal University.

Zueva, who also attended the 2016 gathering, helped prepare this year’s Limmud FSU program, which featured Russia’s chief rabbi, Berel Lazar; Ilya Altman, co-chair of the Russian Research and Educational Holocaust Center in Moscow; educator and writer Dima Zicer, who talked about how to raise children; Yuri Tabak, an expert on the roots of antisemitism in Russia; Ronen Krausz, minister plenipotentiary of the Israeli Embassy in Moscow; and Yitzhak Gorelik, the chief rabbi of Tatarstan.

“This is not the first Limmud in M Kazan, and we know that in previous years, the conference was held here in its best traditions — supporting and strengthening Jewish identity through interest in Jewish culture and heritage, combined with a spirit of volunteerism,” said Dorit Golender, vice-president for community relations at Genesis Philanthropy Group, one of Limmud FSU’s key backers, along with the Claims Conference, the Jewish National Fund (KKL), the Blavatnik Family Foundation, philanthropists Diane Wohl and Tom Blumberg, and others. “This is key to the success of Limmud all over the world, and Kazan is no exception.”

Polina Galitskaya, 40, who heads the Limmud FSU Volga-Urals organizing committee, teaches microbiology at Kazan Federal University. She gave a lecture about COVID-19, vaccines and PCR tests.

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