The latest numbers on Europe’s Jews are Adolf Hitler’s dream coming true.
According to a Rabbinical Center of Europe’s research, over 85% of European Jews assimilate and intermarry with non-Jews, 80% do not attend synagogues, 75% of Jewish children in Europe do not receive a Jewish education, and over 90% of European Jewish students have no connections with the Jewish community. A memory, a community, a tradition, a liturgy, a history, a faith, a patrimony are all perishing as a result.
This is a most impressive report on the status of Europe’s Jews. Rabbi Shimon Elitov, a member of the Israeli Chief Rabbinate Council, rightly said that “assimilation in the shocking numbers that we see is worse that the physical Holocaust that we saw”.
These numbers clearly show that Europe’s Jewish communities will have neither the strength nor the means to counter this scenario by themselves. There is nothing on the horizon to reverse the integration of Europe’s Jews into Western secularized and Islamicized environment. The circle of assimilation under multiculturalism is self-reinforcing.
It is the story of Moses Mendelssohn. He was cultured, cosmopolitan, Jewish, but his story became emblematic of the progression from emancipation to assimilation. Four of Mendelssohn’s six children and eight of his nine grandchildren were baptized. But unlike Mendelssohn’s children, the current Europe’s Jews will require no baptism. Just vanishing and dying out.
Jewish writer Arthur Koestler came to the same conclusion after the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, maintaining that Europe’s Jews were left with only two options; emigration to Israel or assimilation. Koestler opted for the latter and took his own life.
The latest numbers on Europe’s Jews are Adolf Hitler’s dream coming true. What Nazism didn’t manage to do is happening now in the European Diaspora with this horrific assimilation.
In Europe’s streets, fear and persecution are turning the Jews into ghosts without yarmulkes and the sounds of Hebrew. In Europe’s houses, Jews are opting for cultural and religious suicide.
Europe’s Jewry has always been doomed from the beginning: the brutal amputation of more than one third of Jewry in the Holocaust had created a precarious condition of Jewish weakness. Jews then made a conscious effort to end their existence as Jews. This is the meaning of the current assimilation record.
Is this Europe’s Jews only viable option? First, assimilation will feed a new wave of shocking anti-Semitism. Hitler wanted to kill the intermarried Jews as well and the Jews who felt themselves the most integrated, the most accepted, the most German, suddenly realized that German society had always viewed them only as Juden. Jews.
But if in the ‘30s the Jews didn’t have a chance, they can now buy a one-way ticket to the Tel Aviv International Airport.