In the wake of the desecration of a 280-year-old synagogue and other recent anti-Semitic incidents in the Netherlands, a Jewish group has asked the European Union to intervene.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center, in a letter issued June 15, requested the EU’s “intervention to investigate the rampant epidemic in anti-Semitic incidents,” due in part to the current “political vacuum following General Election.”
“In addition to the synagogue desecrated with red spray-paint late last month, a commemoration ceremony for the last transport of 3,000 Jewish children deported to their death was disrupted by passing bikers shouting ‘Heil Hitler’ during the mourners’ Kaddish prayer; Hyves, known as the Dutch Facebook, has postings rife with calls ‘to murder all Jews’ and for ‘Adolf Hitler to finish the job’; the Center for Information and Documentation on Israel in the Hague reported receiving phone messages calling for ‘many gas chambers to be built’; and children from the Rosh Pina Jewish elementary school were continually abused during an organized walk through south Amsterdam’ in recent weeks,” according to the letter.
Anti-Semitic incidents grew by 64 percent in 2009. — jta