European rabbi who slammed calls for Jews to move to Israel now says they may be coming

A prominent rabbi from Brussels who once criticized Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for calling on European Jews to move to Israel now asks the Jewish state to prepare for a wave of immigrants from the continent due to antisemitism.

“My message to the Israeli prime minister today is not as sure as it used to be,” says Menachem Margolin, head of the European Jewish Association lobby group in Brussels, at a conference in Amsterdam on combating antisemitism.

“Today I say to Israel: We are not there yet, but be ready, get your government agencies ready,” Margolin says.

If European governments “carry on as they have so far, if they continue to tolerate this flood of Jew hate, they can expect hundreds and thousands of us to leave,” Margolin adds.

The conference, which is titled “Fighting Back for Our Future” and is co-sponsored by Israel’s Ministry for Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism and the Christians for Israel group, brings together dozens of European Jewish community leaders and addresses the explosion in antisemitic hate crimes that followed the October 7 Hamas onslaught in Israel. The event features a legal panel tasked with devising practical legal tools for fighting antisemitism.

Eddo Verdoner, the Dutch government’s point man for fighting antisemitism, says Jewish communities are experiencing “the largest rise in antisemitism since the Shoah, since the murder of the Holocaust.” Verdonner, who is Jewish, calls for strict enforcement against antisemitic hate crimes but also for “celebrating Jewish life, enabling it to thrive.”