Antwerp shop owner won’t sell to Jews in ‘protest’

A Belgian Jewish woman said an Antwerp shop owner refused to serve her “out of protest.”

The woman, identified by the initials B.H., told police and the Jewish monthly Joods Actueel that she was declined service on Monday when she entered his clothes store in the shopping district of central Antwerp.

A spokesman from the Antwerp police department confirmed to Joods Actueel that the case was being investigated.

“When I came to the cash register to pay for a few items I was told, ‘We currently don’t sell to Jews out of protest,’ ” the woman, who is Orthodox and identifiable as Jewish, told the weekly.

According to the report, which did not name the shop or its owner, the man would not say what he was protesting.

The weekly then sent a reporter with a hidden video camera to the store, where the reporter interviewed an employee about the incident.

Asked about the incident, the employee told the reporter, “It was my boss and he was protesting.” Asked again whether the shop owner had a policy of not selling to Jews, the employee said, “Yeah, that’s what he says.”

But when Joods Actueel contacted the shop owner, he denied his business has such a policy.

“On the contrary, we have many Jewish clients and we buy our products from a Jew,” the owner said, adding, “Why would we not sell to Jews? We’d only be hurting ourselves.”

Also in central Antwerp, a few dozen men on Saturday shouted “slaughter the Jews” during a protest against Israel’s operation in Gaza that has killed nearly 200 Palestinians. The operation is aimed at halting rocket fire from Gaza on civilian targets in Israel.