A major survey among Belgian teenagers indicated anti-Semitism was seven times more prevalent among Muslim youths than in non-Muslim teenagers.

Conducted in recent months by three universities for the Flemish government, the survey was published last month based on questionnaires filled out by 3,867 high school students in Antwerp and Ghent, including 1,068 Muslims.

Among Muslims, 50.9 percent of respondents agreed with the statement “Jews foment war and blame others for it” compared to only 7.1 percent among non-Muslims. Among Muslims, 24.5 percent said they partially agreed with the statement, as did 20.6 percent of non-Muslims.

The statement “Jews seek to control everything” received a 45.1 approval rating among Muslims compared to 10.8 approval among non-Muslims. Of Muslims, 27.9 percent said they partially agreed, as did 29.2 percent of non-Muslims.

About 35 percent of Muslims agreed with the statement that “Jews have too much clout in Belgium” compared to 11.8 percent of non-Muslims who participated in the “Young in Antwerp and Ghent” survey. The results were part of a 360-page report which was produced for the Flemish government’s Youth Research Platform by the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven; GhentUniversity and Vrije Universiteit Brussel.

Claude Marinower, Antwerp’s alderman for education, told JTA he found the data “most troubling.” In an interview for the Antwerp-based monthly Joods Actueel, Marinower announced he would launch an action plan to fight anti-Semitism in the Flemish capital’s schools.

Yesterday, March 11, 2013, the European Union commemorates the 9th European Day in Remembrance of Victims of Terrorism.

Here’s the key part of an official statement released by the E.U. Counter-Terrorism Coordinator, Gilles de Kerchove:

All acts of terrorism are criminal and unjustifiable, wherever they took place or whoever committed them. Therefore, our resolve to defeat terrorism must never weaken or falter even for a day, and our support to victims to meet their needs must remain a priority, as well as our commitment to actively promoting a policy of international solidarity.

Seems like a good time to remind him of the need to outlaw the outrageous and flagrant terrorists of Hizbollah whose supporters operate within the law in Europe with no evident interference from officials of the E.U. or of its Counter-Terrorism Coordinator. This ought to surprise us given that a Bulgarian court found last month that it was Hizbollah that stood behind the terrorist attack last summer on a tourist bus full of Israelis, killing five of them and their driver.

Mr de Kerchove knows this. But despite his public call today never to weaken or to falter ”even for a day” in the battle to defeat terrorism, he doesn’t actually seem to mean the Hizbollah brand of terrorism, but other terrorisms. (Truthfully, we’re not completely sure which, but it seems that he is).

Here is how he expressed it in a January 28, 2013 interview (“EU official: Hezbollah unlikely to get on terrorism blacklist“) with E.U. Observer when asked if Europe should go along with the requests of the United States and Israel to make it illegal, for instance, to give donation money to Hizbollah:

…For De Kerchove, the situation is not so simple. “First, we need to reach conclusions with strong evidence that it was the military wing of Hezbollah [which indeed carried out the terrorist bombing at Burgas airport in Bulgaria]. That’s the prerequisite, even in legal terms, but then, as always in the listing process, you need to ask yourself: ‘Is this the right thing to do?’… For Hezbollah, you might ask, given the situation in Lebanon, which is a highly fragile, highly fragmented country, is listing it going to help you achieve what you want? … There is no automatic listing just because you have been behind a terrorist attack. It’s not only the legal requirement that you have to take into consideration, it’s also a political assessment of the context and the timing…”

The interview was given just before the Bulgarians found, judicially, that Hizbollah was the culprit, so at least that prerequisite was satisfied. But that – why are we surprised? – is evidently not enough.

He noted there is “no consensus” among EU states on whether listing Hezbollah would be helpful or not [E.U. Observer]

which is a very good way to say what official Europe really feels about the battle against the terrorists.

In simple terms, the Commissioner’s official statement today, the one that appears in the press release above, should not be taken too seriously. Perhaps it was only intended for the terror victims and their commemoration ceremonies in the first place. If you really want to go after the terrorists, then the way forward – according to Europe’s Counter-Terrorism Coordinator – calls for more than mere resolve. You need consensus and agreement as to whether it will be helpful.

European politics is populated by a multitude of individuals who are hopelessly ambivalent about the Islamists. As for serious European moves against terror, we can expect to see them limited to press releases and wreath laying ceremonies in civic squares.

Out on the streets and railways and airports of Europe? Not so much.

Visit This Ongoing War.

The sister of a Belgian Nazi leader hid three Jews in her home near Brussels during the Holocaust, according to one of the survivors.

Hanna Nadel, now 86, said she, her mother and her niece were rescued by M. Cornet, the sister of Leon Degrelle, who, as leader of the Belgian Nazi Rexen movement, was responsible for deporting Jews to their deaths during the German occupation of Belgium.

Nadel’s account, related to historian Jan Maes, appeared earlier this week in the Belgian-Jewish monthly Joods Actueel,

The three, having escaped deportation orders, wandered  with their suitcases around the town of Sint-Genesius Rode, where they happened upon a help-wanted sign on Cornet’s door.

The mother rang the doorbell and Cornet, without asking many questions, hired the mother as cook and Nadel and her niece to work as chambermaids.

Cornet knew the three women were Jewish and promised them they would survive. Visitors associated with the Flemish Nazi movement would routinely dine at the house , while the three Jewish women hid in the basement.

Nadel’s mother would sometimes cook gefiltefish, which the lady of the house advertised to her guests as “oriental fish”, Nadel recalled.

Nadel immigrated to Israel after the war. Leon Degrelle left for Spain, where he died of old age in 1994, escaping the death sentences that his Nazi associates received back home.

Belgian Jews are at loggerheads as a result of an EU vote to dispatch the UN to Israel on a mission to scrutinize Jewish towns and communities in Judea and Samaria.

Despite increasing detachment between Belgium’s Flemish and French-speaking population, the Jewish community has always maintained a high level of solidarity. Yet when Belgium became one of only two EU countries to vote in favor of a UN-led probe against Jewish life in what they call the “West Bank”, a major split occurred, according to a report by JTA.

Flemish Jews stated they were “shocked and appalled” by the vote, with French-speaking Jews remaining silent, even sending a representative to meet with a Belgian Foreign Ministry official who noted the warmth of Belg-Israeli relations.

In December, the umbrella organization representing Flemish Jews issued a criticism of the umbrella organization representing French-speaking Jews, for honoring a Belgian po9litician who had equated Israel and Nazism.

According to the JTA report, Antwerp Jews, where the majority of Flemish Jews live, tends to be more religious and strong in their support for Israel, whereas Brussels Jews tend to be more liberal, with less than a quarter of the number of Jewish schools.

I recently received an envelope from Belgium, with legal documents informing me that I was found eligible to receive Holocaust compensation. I saw this as a symbolic rectification of a bitter injustice that seemed to represent the very essence of my life. As I flipped through the pages, my mind wandered back to my childhood.

I cannot remember the first time I heard my grandmother tell the story of how my family had fled from Belgium during the Holocaust. But I heard her tell this story so many times that it became deeply etched into my consciousness. My grandmother told the story from many angles, as if to purge her system of it. She never succeeded, for she continued to retell the same traumatic tale to the end of her life. I always hoped for a happy ending, knowing bitterly it would never be. The story still haunts me.

My grandparents lived with my grandmother’s parents in Belgium. My great-grandfather, Yossel, was a generous man who owned and operated the town’s kosher bakery. He made his fortune supplying the surrounding towns with hand-made matzahs for Pesach. He also owned property and businesses that provided jobs for family members and friends, and he funded a shul that was open to one and all.

When the war broke out, rumors began to circulate about Nazi atrocities. People heard about murder and destruction. Men, women and children were being herded into cattle cars, never to be seen again. Everyone was terror- stricken. My grandparents feared that their town would be next, so they began packing to leave for the south of France. My grandmother was very close with her parents, and she urged them to join them in the escape. However, my great-grandparents stubbornly refused to consider the idea.

The day of departure came. My grandparents and their son, my Uncle Maury, got ready to leave. They brought very little with them. They sewed money and jewels into the seams of their clothes. This would eventually purchase their survival.

A horse-drawn wagon was waiting to take them to the train station. My grandmother would tell me the next part of the story with glassy eyes that pooled with tears streaming down her cheeks.

“We climbed onto the back of the wagon with Maury between us, our bundles tightly clutched in our hands. My parents stood crying, giving us blessings for safety, and I kept thinking that if they didn’t join us, I might never see them again. I begged my father once more to join us. He replied that he was too old to leave, that he would remain with his books. How could he leave them to be destroyed?

“I will not leave my books,” he cried.

“Then the wagon began to move. My mother cried, and my father began to hobble after us with his cane, yelling that he loved us.

“I never saw them again,” my grandmother would finish with a heartrending sob.

My great-grandparents died sometime later that year in Auschwitz. When they were taken away, all of their money, properties and bank accounts were stolen by the Nazis and the Belgian government.

My grandparents, their son Maury, and their two daughters born during the war – one being my mother – miraculously survived. They overcame great hardships that haunted them throughout their lives.

As a young child raised without Torah, I couldn’t understand what was so special about those books for which my great-grandfather died trying to protect. What sort of books was worth dying for?

Years later, after becoming observant, I had an epiphany. The books that my great-grandfather died trying to save were holy Torah sefarim. My grandfather, who owned a shul, thought that by staying, he could protect the Sifrei Torah and other holy books from destruction. He died for the Torah he loved so dearly.

Recently, I filed a claim with Belgium’s government for compensation of my family’s losses in the Holocaust. My extended family members, all of them secular, filled out the forms and we all waited. The family speculated how much money we would get, and some talked about what they’d do with the money. I felt resentment. This was blood money, certainly not “let’s-take-a-vacation-money.”

We were all surprised at the outcome. I was the only great-grandchild found eligible to receive compensation because I’d filled out the most specific information. I quickly got messages from relatives that this was unfair, and that I should share my money with them. Instinctively, I felt that if Hashem had seen it just for me to receive this money, I was destined to do something sacred with it.

I began my mission to right a wrong. My great-grandfather had died trying to save his beloved holy books, and I would use this money toward the purchase of sefarim to replace them.

Today, there are two bookcases filled with sefarim in the Khal Chassidim shul in Chicago. The plaque on the bookcases reads as follows: “In Loving Memory of Yossel and Rifka Czwern, a”h, pious people who loved their fellow man, and valued family, all living creatures, and Torah above all!”

Some sense of restitution had finally been achieved.

The local Jewish community recently received a shock. Many that attended rallies and protests regarding the Gaza War were stunned.  Counter-demonstrators made egregious and hateful statements, some referring to the Holocaust.  They were physically violent.    The actions did not seem to cause any outrage in the general community. 

The idea that the modern world functions on a base of civility is a comforting thought.  After all, aren’t we all members of an enlightened populace and not a primitive mob?  The premise that we have reached a certain plateau of collective culture is a soothing thought.  It makes us feel safe.

In reality, the pretense of a just social order is fragile, indeed.  Just ask our brothers and sisters, who somehow survived the refined and cultured German society that brought on the Shoah.  The facade of civilization is flimsy and the right (or wrong) set of circumstances can set off some very dangerous behavior. It is important for Jews, especially, to be ever vigilant.

Jews, often, because of their position, status or influence feel and felt that “it can’t happen here” and “it can’t happen to me.”  Unfortunately, they eventually see and saw that they were mistaken. 

In the post-Holocaust, world, it was not politically correct to be openly anti-Semitic.  That period is over.  The aftermath of the war in Gaza has apparently changed this dynamic.  There has been an incredible worldwide flood of anti-Semitic acts and rhetoric in this recent period.

Great Britain reports the worst anti-Semitic incidents in a quarter of a century.  The vandalism includes an attempt to firebomb a London synagogue.  France, Sweden, Belgium and Denmark are countries that are also in the fray. Venezuela’s state-sanctioned anti-Semitism is especially disturbing. 

America has had its fair share of this type of activity.  Synagogues in Chicago and Tennessee were vandalized.  There have been ugly demonstrations in many states.

Everyone laughed at the infamous sign at the anti-Israel rally in New York that called for, “Death to the Juice.”  In reality, openly calling for the extinction of a people is no laughing matter.

The economic situation that seems to be a worldwide phenomenon is certainly not a hopeful factor in the equation.  Frightened and angry people invariably seek scapegoats, and the scapegoats are often Jews.

It is incumbent for the Jewish community to keep informed.  Hopefully, this period will pass, however, we must be vigilant and understand the concept of never again!

The problem with G-d is His holiness. After thousands of years of countless trials and many too many unmentionable “sufferings of love” (Berachos 5a) the Jewish people continue to love Him even as many flee His embrace. From the Binding of Isaac to the martyrdom of Rabbi Akiva and the last Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto, G-d’s seeming distance, his hester pannim, confounds the masses and sorely tests the pious. When He is the most distant, and therefore the most Holy, the slaughter of innocent Jews that ensues becomes tragically a chilul Hashem, defaming His holy Name.

“Yossel Rakover Speaks to G-d” by Zvi Kolitz and “Death Triumphant” a painting by Felix Nussbaum both struggle with this most perplexing issue of the Jewish people. The first, a short story purporting to be a last testament of the son of a Ger Hasid fighting in the Warsaw Ghetto, refuses to relinquish belief in God. His experiences as a hunted Jew, a survivor from a German air assault that killed his wife, infant child and two children to the terrible depravations of the ghetto that claimed his last three children has left him spiritually exhausted, proclaiming that; “Life is a tragedy, death a savior; man a calamity, the beast an ideal; day a horror, night – a relief.” As a man of faith, the cruelty he has suffered has turned all certainties upside down. He lashes out at the world that seems determined to annihilate him.

Yossel’s accusations encompass Western civilization, bitterly observing that Hitler is “a typical child of modern man. Humanity as a whole has spawned him and reared him, and he is the frankest expression of its innermost, most deeply buried wishes.”

At 43, he humbly states that he “served G-d enthusiastically” only asking to worship Him, “bikhol livovekho, bikhol nafshekho ubikhol miodekho.” After all his deprivations and sufferings his belief has remained unshaken even though his relationship with G-d is deeply compromised. He feels that G-d “owes me something, owes me much.” Claiming that to cite our sins as a reason for this suffering, “G-d is maligned when we malign ourselves.” After all, we are His people and when G-d’s people suffer, G-d’s Name is besmirched.

In his last moments Yossel reflects upon the nature of vengeance, both human and Divine, the very nature of being a Jew and finally the excruciating nature of chosen-ness. He is the last fighter alive in one room in one house in Warsaw in 1943. His desperation elicits a proud affirmation; “I believe in Israel’s G-d even if He has done everything to stop me from believing in Him,” adding that “I bow my head before His greatness, but will not kiss the rod with which He strikes me.” The courageous determination to demand to know when “Youagain [will] revealYour countenance” is unequaled in Holocaust literature.

Mark Altman’s English and Yiddish production of Yossel Rakover Speaks to G-d (staged reading at the Diaspora Drama Group) on June 7th will explore exactly these excruciating themes. The poignant voice of Yossel will ring out that evening, a seminal testimony and clarion call from the grave of 65 years ago. Except for the fact that Yossel is a fictional character created by Zvi Kolitz. This character, invented by Mr. Kolitz for a Yiddish newspaper in Argentina in 1946, took on a life of its own. The story was subsequently published in English and Hebrew without any attribution to Mr. Kolitz and became known as an anonymous testimony from the ashes of the Warsaw Ghetto. Fiction had taken on a life as its own, as Emmanuel Levinas commented; “a text both beautiful and true, as only fiction can be.”

Felix Nussbaum traveled a remarkably similar path to a distinctly different conclusion. Nussbaum was born in 1904 in the German town of Osnabruck. He was characterized from an early age as a depressive personality and pursuing his artistic studies his early work was occasionally characterized by a haunting presence of impending death. The Nazi ascent to power spelled the end of Felix’s aspirations to German artistic achievement. His work from this decade vacillates between a kind of primitive and acerbic social commentary and a more than competent 1930′s realism. His increasing use of symbolism reflected the devastating advance of fascist control across Europe even as he attempted to escape its jaws by emigrating to Switzerland and finally Belgium in 1937. More and more Nussbaum utilized masks and self-portraits to reflect and deflect the impending doom.

Nussbaum, along with his wife Felka Platek, were exiles, refugees from their native land and, more importantly, refugees from the sanity of their past. His art became the art of the refugee; haunted, despairing and wrenching. In 1940 he was arrested and interred at the camp of Saint-Cyprien for four months as a German national. During a selection between Aryan Germans and Jews, he escaped and fled through France to his wife in Brussels, Belgium. The camp, its inmates and horrors, became an unavoidable subject for Nussbaum.

Aside from depicting the all too familiar deprivations of internment camps, Nussbaum did a remarkable painting of Camp Synagogue in 1941. It is a deeply brooding meditation on the repercussions of Jewish faith by an artist whose closeness to Judaism seemed to be mainly enforced by the racism of Nazi rulers. Five men, all clad in talisim, trudge towards a tin roofed building under a dark and foreboding sky. One man is isolated even from his fellow Jews, hunched in solitary devotion, perhaps the symbol of the artist himself.

As a stateless person and a Jew, his status in Belgium deteriorated in 1942, a rope hanging appearing as a symbol of approaching doom at the hands of the occupying Gestapo. In 1942 Nussbaum is given refuge by a Belgian sculptor until he flees underground. Finally in 1943 he and his wife go into hiding. The Organ Grinder (1943) begins the paintings in which the figure of Death has assumed prominence. The Damned, painted in January 1944, depicts a hodgepodge of hidden Jews, now terribly exposed for deportation in the claustrophobic streets of their country of refuge. It has become increasingly obvious that there will be no escape.

His last painting dated Tuesday, April 18, 1944, Death Triumphant, is extensively prepared for with numerous sketches of various skeletal figures, each beautifully draped, playing or holding musical instruments. These drawings are arguably some of the most moving and devastating images of futility ever produced. The dead mock the living with mankind’s pathetic culture, music played with no one left to listen. The quest for life is snuffed out in the whirlwind of anti-Semitic hate.

Felix Nussbaum confronted G-d’s terrible hidden-ness just as Yossel did. Felix could not find a faith to express in his vision, only Death triumphs over all culture, all hope, all life. And yet Yossel knows Felix well. Addressing G-d, Yossel pleads “Do not put the rope under too much strain, because, G-d forbid, it might snap. The test to which You have put us is so severe, so unbearably severe, that You should – You must – forgive those of Your people who, in their misery and rage, have turned away from You.”

The problem with G-d is that in His awesome holiness He has given us a terrible choice. Do we act rationally and turn our backs on Him when He seems to abandon us? Or must we scream through the howling abyss and insist on His answer even as the silence engulfs us?

* * *

Zvi Kolitz, author of Yossel Rakover Speaks to G-d, passed away September 29, 2002 after an illustrious career as a film producer (Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer, 1954, Israeli film) and theatrical producer (Rolf Hochhuth’s ground breaking play, The Deputy, 1963) in addition to works of fiction and philosophy and 32 years as a columnist for the Algemeiner Journal. Felix Nussbaum was murdered with his wife in Auschwitz in August, 1944.

Yosl Rakover Talks to G-d by Zvi Kolitz, Vintage, 2000 (with commentaries by Paul Badde, Leon Wieseltier and Emmanuel Levinas).

Yosl Rakover Talks to G-d; A Reading produced by Mark Altman, Tuesday June 7, 2005.

The Diaspora Drama Group at Common Basis Theater; 750 Eighth Avenue (46th Street); 212 868 4444; www.diasporadrama.org; English version directed and performed by Tony Award Winner Vivian Matalon; Yiddish version with David Mandelbaum directed by Amy Coleman.

Felix Nussbaum: Art Defamed, Art in Exile, Art in Resistance: A Biography edited by Karl Georg Kaster, Rasch Verlag, Bramsche, 1994.

Richard McBee is a painter and writer on Jewish Art. Please feel free to contact him with comments at www.richardmcbee.com.