Saying 'Never again is now' to European Jews is an insult - opinion

• Published date: 12 April 2024
• Author: MENACHEM MARGOLIN
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

And in 2025 we will mark the 80th liberation of the camp that prompted these words to be uttered: Auschwitz

What exactly do they mean? No more concentration camps? No more mass murder? One would certainly hope so, given Europe's turbulent and bloody treatment of the Jewish people.

And what about never allowing the circumstances that led to these barbaric and inhuman manifestations of hate to happen again? Does "Never again" mean that too?

The Jewish communities across Europe certainly thought so. It appears that we were laboring under a misapprehension, brought into vivid and stark relief in the aftermath of October 7.

Antisemitism continues to rise at alarming rates

Since the Hamas pogrom, reported cases of antisemitism have gone through the roof – in the UK, Spain, and France the percentage rise is over 1000%. Today, as I write this, Jews are facing levels of antisemitism last seen in 1939 in Nazi Germany.

This is an unbelievable and incredible sentence to have to write.

Things were already bad. Like a dormant volcano before October 7 , there were regular tremors and some eruptions, but we hoped for the best. The war awoke it. Jewish Communities are daily facing molten streams of hate everywhere across the continent.

In Holland, earlier this year, they canceled Holocaust Remembrance Day events at universities over security concerns and because of vociferous opposition to the memorializing. Just recently, in Amsterdam, there were protests at the opening of a new Holocaust museum.

Rabbis are slapped in the street and verbally abused. In capitals across the continent – mainly in those with significant Muslim populations – there are regular protests displaying Nazi images referring to Jews, images drawing parallels between Gaza and Auschwitz, and you can hear calls for Jewish genocide and ethnic cleansing "From the river to the sea." You can read placards calling Jews terrorists, and the blood libel of "child killers" is regularly used.

Death threats against rabbis are common. Jews are insulted on the street on a daily basis and our children cursed at.

Those European citizens who have served in the IDF are outed in their communities through letter campaigns pointing out that a "child killer" is living next to them; flights arriving from Israel are tracked and met by protesters.

The Jewish community president in Porto takes his child to nursery wearing a bulletproof vest. The principal Jewish organizations here in Belgium have had to write to their prime...