Authorities in Oslo, Norway, have permanently closed streets to traffic around the Jewish synagogue. In Berlin, Germany, the Jewish community newsletter is sent without any identifiable markings on the envelope, so as not to ‘out’ recipients as Jews or members.

In Amsterdam, police trailers stand before the 17th century Portuguese Synagogue, the Jewish high school, the Anne Frank Museum, and other institutions. Military police guard the buildings, and Jewish leaders desire that they carry automatic weapons. In Antwerp, an elite army unit patrols the Jewish quarter.

One small group of European Jewish leaders, the European Jewish Association, petitioned the European Union in January to pass new legislation permitting Jewish community members to carry guns ‘for the essential protection of their communities.’ Observers say that, 70 years after the Holocaust, Jew-hatred is spreading in Europe. Jews are seeing their religious freedom violated, their grave sites vandalised, their synagogues desecrated, and Jewish lives lost.

In Paris, an Islamic extremist tied to the Charlie Hebdo killers took over the Hyper Cacher kosher grocery and wantonly killed several Jewish hostages. The Charlie Hebdo killers themselves murdered only one woman, a Jewish woman, at the journal’s offices, intentionally sparing all others. Soon after the events unfolded in Paris, another jihadist in Copenhagen attacked a free speech gathering, and then murdered a voluntary Jewish community guard outside a bat-mitzvah. In each of these events, Jews were coerced to cower in basement hiding places, as if in a classic Bialik poem, to avoid being massacred.

Read the article in full at Fathom Journal.