Year in review: Europe and the United States - The Jewish Chronicle

There was shock this year in Germany at one of the worst antisemitic incidents seen in the country since the Second World War.

Yom Kippur was the date picked by lone gunman Stephan Balliet to take his homemade rifle to a synagogue in the town Halle. The 27-year-old killed two members of the public but failed to break down the shul’s bulky wooden door. Had he made it in, he would have found dozens of congregants praying.

In the United States, a congregant saved her rabbi’s life when she instinctively threw herself in front of a gunman who burst into her synagogue in San Diego during a service on the final day of Pesach. Lori Gilbert Kaye died in the attack while the rabbi, Yisroel Goldstein, lost fingers from his right hand. The suspect, 19-year-old John Timothy Earnest, goes on trial next year.

The year ended on another dark note in the United States after a couple suspected of being supporters of the extremist Black Hebrew Israelites burst into a New Jersey kosher store, killing three people, two of them Jewish.

Donald Trump’s White House announced measures to make Jewish students a protected class after a spate of antisemitic incidents on university campuses, while a measles outbreak meant Charedi families in Brooklyn were told they could not attend synagogue or take their children to school until they were all vaccinated.

Elsewhere in Europe, desecrating cemeteries was a grim theme. Dozens of Jewish headstones were spray-painted with swastikas in Denmark, Poland and Slovakia. France, home to Europe’s largest Jewish population, was a hotspot, particularly the northeastern Alsace region. It came as the French Interior Ministry confirmed a 74 per cent rise in antisemitic incidents.

But in future we may look back at France as the place where the fightback began: in February, thousands of people attended a solidarity rally in Paris under the slogan Ça Suffit (“That’s Enough”) and the French authorities responded first by adopting the IHRA definition of antisemitism, then by creating a dedicated government department to combat hate crimes.

2019 saw the death of Jacques Chirac died, remembered by Jews for being the first French president to acknowledge his country collaborated in Nazi crimes.

In Belgium, gunman Mehdi Nemmouche was finally jailed for life for his role in the 2014 Brussels Jewish Museum shooting and there was anger at the Flemish town of Aalst, where the famous street carnival had a float depicting big-nosed Jews sitting with rats and bags of money; the town chose to renounce its UN heritage status rather than change the carnival.

But Belgium now also has a Jewish prime minister — Sophie Wilmès, the first woman in the role — while Ukraine’s Jewish premier was joined by a Jewish president: the comedian Volodymyr Zelensky, who resoundingly won April’s presidential election.

And there were mixed fortunes for political extremists: Spain’s two elections produced a surge for the Vox party to make it Europe’s largest far-right movement but a political scandal saw Austria’s far-right fall out of government and haemorrhage voter support in the contest that followed.