European Jews remember Kristallnacht

11 November 2008

BRUSSELS – European Jews on Monday marked the 70th anniversary of Nazi Germany’s Kristallnacht riots while warning that their situation in Europe is worse than it was 60 years ago.

"Today we feel worse than after the Second World War," Moshe Kantor, president of the European Jewish Congress (EJC), said at the ceremonies in Brussels marking the Kristallnacht.

"What politicians and governments nowadays in Europe permit themselves is something which we could not have imagined 10 or 20 years ago," Kantor said.

There were now more neo-Nazis and Nazi sympathisers in Europe than there were Jews, he said. Increasingly, remembrance of the Holocaust is fading away.

"The world is once again in danger," Kantor warned. Above all, the worldwide financial crisis may lead to increased anti-Semitism and intolerance.

The EJC, based in Paris, is the umbrella organization of 40 elected leaders of Jewish groups of individual European countries.

The EJC remembrance ceremonies came a day after Germany marked the 70th anniversary of the Kristallnacht, “the night of shattered glass”, of 9 November 1938, when mobs attacked and burned synagogues and Jewish shops and homes throughout Nazi Germany, killing more than 1,300 people.

[Dpa / Expatica]