The murder of HaRav Avrohom Yehoshua Greenbaum, Hy"d,
head of kollel Beis Mordechai in Bnei Brak and father
of 11, in Zurich last week is only a sharp, dramatic and
painful expression of the general tone of the prevailing
feelings in Europe about Jews. The Israeli public is not
directly exposed to the reporting and commentary in Europe
about events in Israel. The media there are very one-sided
and, if words could kill, there would be a lot more Jewish
casualties, Hashem yeracheim.
The governments behave the same way. Only a month ago French
president Chirac called Yasser Arafat a "great peacemaker" --
after he had most recently presided over eight months of
Palestinian-initiated violence and bloodshed, including
Palestinian media incitement to war and destruction.
Often, an explicit or implicit parallel is made between the
modern Palestinians being killed by Israelis and the Jews of
60 years ago butchered by the Nazis. Perhaps it is only
intended to provide some sort of after-the-fact
justification for past sins of commission or ommission
against the Jews on the part of other Europeans, but there
is no doubt that it fans the fires of current hatred of Jews
and has an effect on the general atmostphere and perhaps on
the acts of deranged murderers such as the one who
apparently attacked HaRav Greenbaum. The Israeli side of the
struggle with the Palestinians is not given. The press
accepts Palestinian reports of the events without question
and portrays them as helpless victims of the powerful
Israeli military machine. The fact that the initiative for
the violence, from the beginning and through today, is from
the Palestinian side is totally absent from press
reports.
The steady media diet of Israeli "atrocities" against the
Palestinians, coupled with the commentary that is
unabashedly and unremittingly anti-Israel, can easily lead
an unbalanced individual to believe that he is doing
something that will be approved by society when attacking
the Jewish enemy, as seems to have been the case in
Switzerland.
The true feelings that lie behind these portrayals of Israel
are evident from the unexpected fact that in many
carricatures and editorial cartoons, an Israeli is depicted
as a chareidi Jew in traditional garb. The majority of
Israelis are far from being or looking like traditional
Jews, and the chareidi community is perhaps even further
from even being implicated in the false accusations of the
press, but this "mistaken" representation of an Israeli
betrays the true background to the cartoons: traditional
images of Jews are used because the true underlying feelings
are the traditional antisemitic antipathy to Jews per
se rather than a simple disagreement with Israeli
policies.
It is no wonder that chareidi visitors to Europe are
frequently cautioned against being too blatantly Jewish and
advised to be discreet. Even in the many areas of Europe
that today are virtually free of Jews, a chareidi figure
elicits expressions in both word and deed of hatred of Jews
that is viscerally familiar and revives ancestral memories
of the millenium that our ancestors lived in Europe.
It is unfortunate that the current events coincide with the
settlement of monetary claims against German and Austrian
companies. Those payments, even when justified, certainly
arouse resentment among many people, and those sentiments
will likely be directed at Jews even when -- as in the case
of the slave labor payments -- the bulk of the money will go
to non-Jews.
Nonetheless, the press and government of Europe cannot wash
their hands of at least part of the responsibility for such
hate crimes, as long as they are not more sensitive to the
dangers of antisemitism.
