Croatian Jews to boycott country’s official Holocaust commemorations
The Jewish community in Croatia said it will boycott the country’s official Holocaust commemoration events this year to protest alleged government inaction to curb neo-Nazism.
The Coordinating Committee of the Jewish Communities of Croatia said it would hold its own commemoration “in line with Jewish tradition” instead of participating in the government one, the Voice of America reported on April 4.
The committee’s president, Ognjen Kraus, told the radio station that the move followed cases of open anti-Semitism, including chants by demonstrators of pro-Nazi slogans at an anti-government march in January and during a soccer match between the Israeli and Croatian national teams last month.
“The state is simply not doing anything about it and does not want to,” Kraus said.
The Croatian government has not yet responded to the Jewish community’s decision to ignore the official ceremony. But Prime Minister Tihomir OreÅ¡ković has spoken out against hate speech in the media.
Every April, Croatia honors the victims of the Jasenovac death camp, operated by the pro-Nazi Ustasha regime of World War II. The camp is known as Croatia’s Auschwitz.
In all, some 30,000 of Croatia’s Jews died during the Holocaust — 80 percent of the country’s Jewish population, according to the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum in Jerusalem. — jta
Anti-Semitic incidents reported in Austria up more than 80 percent last year
The number of anti-Semitic incidents reported in Austria increased by more than 80 percent last year, according to the Austrian Forum Against Anti-Semitism.
The forum said 465 incidents were recorded during 2015, over 200 of them being Internet postings hostile to Jews.
The total number of Internet postings reported to Austria’s constitutional protection authority as offensive remained stable in 2015, but the number of postings liable to be used in criminal proceedings doubled compared to 2014, an Interior Ministry spokesman told Reuters.
“The whole picture is terrifying,” Oskar Deutsch, president of the Jewish Communities of Austria, told the news agency.
There was a clear trend of increasingly hostile behavior by Muslims against the 15,000 Jews living in Austria, the Jewish community representative said.
In several European countries, including France and the Netherlands, watchdog groups attribute most anti-Semitic incidents to immigrants from Muslim countries. — jta