World Holacausto Day: warning against the development of anti-Semitism

The Israeli government denounced Sunday, on the occasion of the International Day of Holocaust Remembrance, that 2018 was the year of the most anti-Semitic attacks in the world since 1990, an alert added to that triggered there is a few days in Europe by a report of the organization of progressive Judaism.

According to the report, several countries of the European Union (EU), including Poland, Hungary, Croatia, Lithuania and Latvia, are reviewing their Holocaust memory and downplaying their role in the murder of millions of Jews, a phenomenon that coincides with the electoral growth in these countries and others of the region of the nationalist parties and the far right.

Examples

The report, released Friday on the occasion of International Holocaust Day, gives examples in each country.

In Poland, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki pbaded a law in 2018 that provides for sentences of up to three years in prison for using the expression "Polish concentration camps" or accused Poland of complicity in the country. # 39; Holocaust.

The law provoked so much repudiation both inside and outside the country that the government had to moderate the text and change the criminal sanction into a civil sanction.

Morawiecki participated today in the commemoration of the 74th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi extermination camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau, where it is estimated that more than one million people , mainly Jews, died between 1940 and 27 January 1945., when the Soviet army released the survivors.

The report on Progressive Judaism also highlights the example of Hungary, a country where more than half a million Jews were killed during World War II.

There, Viktor Orban's government downplayed the Hungarians' participation in the extermination and blamed everything on the Germans, while beginning to claim local personalities who participated in the expulsions, according to the report quoted by the agency. EFE press.

Recently, moreover, far-right parties have arrived for the first time in the German Federal Parliament, in coalition with the Italian government and a regional government in Spain, and have returned to a presidential ballot. La France.

More attacks

In Germany, the Social Democrat Heiko Maas, Minister of Foreign Affairs, took advantage of today's commemoration to call for a reinforcement of actions to keep in memory the memory of what has happened. spent during the Second World War, especially in the face of growing popularity of the far right.

"Our culture of memory is cracking and is under pressure from the far right," Maas said in an article published by the Sunday newspaper Welt am Sonntag on the occasion of the anniversary of the release of Auschwitz.

According to recent polls, 40% of young Germans say that they know almost nothing of what was the Holocaust.

"Those born today are as far from the night of broken glbad as I was in Bismark's day, we must make our culture of remembrance a culture of knowledge and make historical knowledge useful for the present," he said. concluded Maas.

In this European context and after the public emancipation of white supremacist groups in the United States after the capture of Donald Trump, the Israeli government revealed that last year it had recorded the highest number of anti-Semitic attacks since 1990.

"These are the highest levels of anti-Semitism in the streets, on the Internet and on the political scene in the world, unlike in previous years, they are led by white supremacists and neo-Nazis," the minister said. Foreign Affairs in the presentation of the report. the diaspora, Naftali Benet.

"It is our responsibility to help the millions of our diaspora brothers and sisters who face more and more anti-Semitic crimes," Benet said, warning that hate-motivated crimes against Jews had increased 70% last year.