The kippah is prohibited all over Europe. It is the symbol of a continent that is inexorably emptying itself of its Jews. Wearing a Jewish yarmulke is a revolutionary revolt in Berlin, Paris, Rome, Malmö and Brussels.
Europe has lost half of its Jewish population, not since the Holocaust, but since 1960 to the present. Just stand in front of the the famous Portuguese synagogue of Amsterdam, built in 1675, in a period in which the Netherlands welcomed the Jews from all over the world, and you will understand what it means being a Jew in Europe. The police will tell you it is "not safe".
Even England, which has so far stood in Europe as a country with a lower degree of anti-Semitism, is shaken by a report of the Government about a boom of anti-Jewish intolerance in the British society. The climate is characterized by the Baroness Jenny Tonge, a House of Commons’ member who has just asked the Jews to distance themselves from Israel. And Sky News in recent days aired a video on the reconstruction of Gaza with the words “Auschwitz Remembered” as background.
In a Jewish school in London, students are training for a possible terrorist attack, a synagogue has canceled a trip to Disneyland in France, while the police have intensified patrols in Jewish areas.
In Austria last week a judge, Philip Christl, decided that shouting “Death to the Jews” is a form of “protest against Israel”. And in England 700 artists just announced a cultural boycott of Israel, including musicians such as Richard Ashcroft of The Verve, Brian Eno and Roger Waters, filmakers like Mike Leigh, writers such as John Bergerand, playwrights like Caryl Churchill.
For this British élite, the Chinese invasion of Tibet was an energetic measure to bring socialism to a feudal land; dissenting to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia was a mistake deserving execution; the Palestinian Arab terrorists (and Germans, Venezuelan, Japanese who help them) are patriots acting out of despair; the massacres in Cambodia are a revolutionary event; the heavy hand of the British military against the Irish terrorists was an insult to humanity; the hijackers of planes differ from their passengers; the Russian tanks in Budapest saved, by drastic means, the glory of socialism; and the Israeli raid in Entebbe broke international law.
In Germany, a survey of the Bertelsmann Foundation has just revealed that 35 percent of German citizens consider Israel as “a new Nazism”. Professor MonikaSchwarz-Friesel at the Technical University of Berlin has analyzed ten years of hate mail sent to the Central Council of Jewsin Germany and the Israeli Embassy in Berlin. To her surprise, only the three percent came from right-wing extremists, while over sixty percent came from educated members of the leftist, anti-fascist and humanitarian mainstream. These mails contained statements such as “the murder of innocent children suits your tradition”.
Everywhere in Europe, from Milan to Marseille, anti-Semitism is returning to the intensity of the ‘30s of the twentieth century. How did we reach this level of madness and irrationality? This is a mystery. Nobody knows why an entire continent suddenly began to gas and incinerate 6 million Jews either.
But I know that despite this, I would like to continue to see my Jewish friends here in this lost Europe along with me, I also know they would be safer in Eretz Yisrael. That is the land God gave them, not the European shtetl. The Temple Mount in Jerusalem, not the cafés in Copenaghen.