Cameron, Merkel, other EU leaders vow to protect their Jews

Amid a wave of anti-Semitic attacks, European leaders pledged this week to ensure the safety of their Jewish communities, rebuffing calls by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for massive Jewish emigration to Israel.

The spat over Europe’s Jews follows a series of fatal terror attacks — in Copenhagen Saturday, and Paris last month — that were directed at Jewish as well as other targets.

The Paris attacks left 17 people dead, including four Jewish men who were taken hostage by an Islamist gunman at a kosher supermarket, while in Copenhagen, a Jewish man was shot dead while guarding a synagogue — also perpetrated by a gunman with suspected links to jihadist organizations.

Netanyahu’s unequivocal remarks, voiced in the aftermaths of both attacks, piqued European leaders for suggesting that Jews living in Europe should move to the Jewish state in order to avoid anti-Semitism.

“Jews have been murdered on European soil, only because they were Jews,” Netanyahu said Sunday. “Of course, Jews deserve protection in every country, but we say to Jews, to our brothers and sisters: Israel is your home.”

British Prime Minister David Cameron rejected his Israeli counterpart’s call, and insisted Tuesday that Jews are safe in the United Kingdom and that they are pleased to call the UK home.

“While I am prime minister I promise we will fight anti-Semitism with everything we have got,” Cameron said.

“Britain is proud to be a multi-ethnic, multi-faith democracy,” he noted, responding also in part to a report released early February by a London-based anti-Semitism watchdog that claimed 2014 had seen the highest-ever number of anti-Semitic incidents in Britain.

In a similar vein, German Chancellor Angela Merkel pledged to ensure the security of Jewish sites and praised the seeming cultural renaissance sweeping the country’s Jewish community in the wake of the Holocaust.

“We would like to continue living well together with the Jews who are in Germany today,” Merkel said in Berlin Monday. “We are glad and thankful that there is Jewish life in Germany again.”

Speaking to reporters Monday, Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt also advised Jews not to emigrate, and voiced her support for the Jewish community in the wake of the attacks.

“The Jewish community has been in this country for centuries. They belong in Denmark, they are part of the Danish community, and we wouldn’t be the same without the Jewish community in Denmark,” she said.

In France, however, the calls were more forceful, with Prime Minister Manuel Valls openly criticizing Netanyahu for his remarks while simultaneously pleading with local Jews to stay.

“My message to French Jews is the following: France is wounded with you and France does not want you to leave,” Valls said Monday.

On Sunday several hundred tombs had been defaced at a Jewish cemetery in the east of the country, in what the French Interior Minister called “a despicable act.”

Speaking at a ceremony Tuesday at the cemetery, President Francois Hollande assured the Jewish community that they will be protected by the government “with all its force.”

France has emerged as a focal point in the battle over Europe’s Jews, in part because it has the largest Jewish population on the continent — numbering nearly 480,000 — and in part because in recent years the rate of aliyah, or Jewish emigration to Israel, from the country has spiked, ostensibly in reaction to intolerable levels of anti-Semitism.

Aliyah from France in 2014 stood at approximately 7,000 people — nearly four times the number of Jews who made aliyah in 2012, making Netanyahu’s call in the eyes of the French leadership all the more vociferous.

“I regret Benjamin Netanyahu’s remarks. Being in the middle of an election campaign doesn’t mean you authorize yourself to make just any type of statement. The place for French Jews is France,” Valls said.

Israel is holding a general election on March 17.

On Thursday a leading figure in the French Jewish community labelled rampant anti-Semitism a major factor in rising aliyah levels.

“The atmosphere for Jews in France is pretty bad,” said Roger Cukierman, president of the CRIF federation of French Jewish communities.

The choice for parents, he added, “is either to send children to public schools, where they may be beaten and insulted [for being Jews] or to send them to Jewish schools, where they may be targets for fanatics and murderers. This is why we see more and more people deciding to go to Israel.”

Indeed, on Sunday the Israeli government approved an unparalleled NIS 180 million ($46 million) allocation to absorb thousands of new immigrants expected to arrive this year from Ukraine, France and Belgium.

“We are preparing and calling for the absorption of mass immigration from Europe,” Netanyahu said amid the bill’s finalization.

But calls from leading European Jewish figures were by no means unilateral, with Denmark’s Chief Rabbi Jair Melchoir intoning Sunday that “terror is not a reason to move to Israel.”

Denmark has prided itself for decades on being one of a tiny number of nations that were able to save the majority of its Jews during the Holocaust.

“People from Denmark move to Israel because they love Israel, because of Zionism. But not because of terrorism,” Melchior told reporters. “If the way we deal with terror is to run somewhere else, we should all run to a deserted island.”

Times of Israel staff contributed to this report