Anti-Semitic violence surged 40% worldwide last year

[oberliner]

37. In 2015, Anti-Semitism Should No Longer Be a Reality in Europe

When I was a child, my mother used to tell me how when he was only 11 years old, my grandfather left his hometown of Danzig (now Gdansk, in Poland), and traveled alone on a boat to England. My grandfather is Jewish and the trip saved his life.

I listened to that story from the safety of the 1990s. It was a long time ago, I thought. It won’t happen again.

And yet, here we are, in 2015. Over the past few days and weeks, we have seen too much evidence that far from being a painful memory of the past, anti-Semitism is still very much alive in Europe. In January, four Jewish men were killed in a kosher supermarket in Paris, two days after the brutal attack on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo that left 12 people dead. Last week, a man attacked a synagogue in Copenhagen, killing a Jewish man as he guarded the building during a Bat Mitzvah celebration. Hours earlier, the same man attacked a cultural centre where a debate on blasphemy and freedom of expression was taking place, killing a man and injuring three police officers. Investigations are still underway, but the events are disturbingly similar to the attacks in Paris in January.

http://www.hrw.org/news/2015/02/18/2015-anti-semitism-should-no-longer-be-reality-europe