The welfare of European Jewry is American responsibility - opinion

• Author: WILLIAM DAROFF
• Published date: 05 October 2021
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

The anniversary, of perhaps the single biggest mass killing of Jews in the entire Shoah serves as a chilling reminder for us to be forever vigilant in preserving the memory of the Holocaust so that the promise of "Never Again!" remains true. For years, the site was barely marked. But the Ukrainian government has made it a priority to mark the anniversary and keep the memory of what happened there alive.

Commemorating the terrors of Europe's past – as will be again this week in Kyiv – is important because in recent years European antisemitism, which never completely disappeared, has returned with a vengeance. The murders of elderly Jewish women in France. Attacks on our houses of worship in Germany. Neo-Nazi marches in the streets of Poland unabated. The longtime hold of antisemitic ideas on a whole mainstream political faction, in the form of Jeremy Corbyn's wing of the British Labour Party – or among the rising tide of neo-fascist political parties across the continent.

The Holocaust for many decades served as a dark warning to Europe, a sign of where antisemitism can lead. But as its very last survivors approach the ends of their lives, the memory of the atrocity has lost much of its power as a deterrent.

The new European antisemitism is now a composite – if you will – a hodgepodge combining age-old racial and religious enmity toward Jews with two new elements. The first of these complains that Holocaust memory itself is excessive, obscuring atrocities committed against other groups, serving the interests of an imagined Jewish lobby; the second, appearing under the guise of anti-Zionism, proceeds to heap upon the State of Israel accusations that were once leveled against Jews. While this new antisemitism rears its head all around the world, Europe has proven to be a most propitious environment; as the continent grapples with mass migrations and the legacy of World War II, it also hosts inordinate protest against the Jewish state.

American Jewry has a long and proud reputation of coming to the aid of our co-religionists in Europe, and it still has an important role to play today. The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, and many of our member organizations, continues this work by partnering with and lending assistance to national Jewish umbrella organizations across the continent. More than a million Jews still reside in Europe; the world's third-largest Jewish community is in France. While world Judaism increasingly looks like...