***** Religious Freedom is a RIGHT for everyone*****
***** Jesus taught: Love your Neighbor *****
By Karl Ritter ASSOCIATED PRESS
MALMO, Sweden
Marcus Eilenberg is a Swedish Jew whose family roots in Malmo run deep. His paternal grandparents were Holocaust survivors who found shelter in this southern Swedish city in 1945. His wife’s parents fled to Sweden from communist Poland in the 1960s.
Now the 32-year-old law firm associate feels the welcome for Jews is running out, and he is moving to Israel with his wife and two children in May. He says he knows at least 15 other Jews who are leaving for a similar reason.
That reason, he says, is a rise in hate crimes against Jews in Malmo, and a sense that local authorities have little desire to deal with a problem that has exposed a crack in Sweden’s image as a bastion of tolerance and a haven for distressed ethnic groups.
Anti-Semitic crimes in Europe have usually been associated with the far right, but Shneur Kesselman, an Orthodox rabbi, says the threat now comes from Muslims.
“In the past five years I’ve been here, I think you can count on your hand how many incidents there have been from the extreme right,” he said. “In my personal experience, it’s 99 percent Muslims.”
Sweden prides itself on having taken in tens of thousands of the world’s war refugees. About 7 percent of Malmo’s 285,000 people were born in the Middle East, according to city statistics, and the city has large numbers from the Balkans, including the Macedonian who heads the city’s largest mosque. After the Holocaust, it took in many Jews who survived the World War II Nazi genocide.
Malmo police say that of 115 hate crimes reported in 2009, 52 were anti-Semitic. Bejzat Becirov, the mosque head, estimated there are about 60,000 Muslims in Malmo. But the number of Jews is about 700 and shrinking – it was twice as big two decades ago, according to Fredrik Sieradzki, a spokesman for the Jewish community.
Last year at least 10 of the hate-crime complaints were filed by Mr. Kesselman, from the Brooklyn-based Chabad-Lubavitch movement, whose black fedora and long beard single him out as he moves around the city.
Walking home from the Jewish community center on Malmo’s snow-flecked streets, the 31-year-old rabbi recalls some of the worst incidents: a young man who shouted “Heil Hitler” and chased him off a city bus; a car that suddenly reversed and almost hit him on the crosswalk by the opera house.
