Rabbi Jacobs referred to this when he said, “Of course I try to reassure people, but the future doesn’t look good . I hope that the Jewish people do not have to be liberated from the Netherlands in the future like our ancestors in Egypt.”
The prohibition of ritual slaughter may greatly dent the traditional image of the country’s tolerant attitude toward the Jews. This is largely based on the romanticizing of the Anne Frank story. One Dutch journalist, who at the end of the 1990s had been involved in the investigation of the shortcomings of the postwar restitution of looted Jewish possessions said to me that it was only then that he understood that he did not live “in the country where Anne Frank had been hidden, but in the land where Anne Frank had been betrayed.”
Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld is chairman of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.
