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Friday February 18, 2005

British Jews confront rising levels of anti-Semitism

by daniella peled
jta

london | New official statistics reveal that anti-Semitic incidents in Britain have reached new heights.

According to the Community Security Trust, the body that monitors threats to British Jewry, a total of 532 anti-Semitic incidents were recorded last year, marking a 42 percent increase from 2003.

The figures include a 323 percent rise in anti-Semitic threats, with an all-time high of 93 such incidents last year, compared with 22 in 2003.

There also was a 54 percent increase in assaults, with 83 attacks recorded last year, including four in which the victim’s life was endangered.

Britain historically has been a generally tolerant and calm society, but in recent years life has become more uncomfortable for the country’s 290,000 Jews, most of whom live in London.

“Violent assaults increased disproportionately,” said the trust’s director of communications, Michael Whine. “This increase is extremely alarming. The transfer of tensions in the Middle East to the streets of Britain has resulted in an unprecedented level of anti-Semitic incidents.”

“Jews now have two fronts, which wasn’t the case five years ago,” said Barry Kosmin of the U.K.’s Institute for Jewish Policy Research. “There is a constant level that comes from the far right, but there’s the opening of a new front by far-left and Palestinian sympathizers and people antagonistic to the Zionist cause.”

The trust’s figures put the correlation between events in the Middle East and attacks on British Jews in stark relief.

In October 2000, just after the start of the Palestinian intifada, the total number of anti-Semitic incidents in Britain leaped to 105, the largest number recorded in a single month for at least five years.

In March 2004, the month in which Israel assassinated Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, there were 100 anti-Semitic incidents, including 54 within 48 hours of Yassin’s death on March 22.

Incidents have ranged from cemetery desecrations — the worst example came in May 2003, when almost 600 gravestones in East London’s Plashet graveyard were defaced — to physical attacks, such as the spate of assaults early this year on members of London’s fervently Orthodox Stamford Hill community.

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