Brussels, October 10th, 2019 – European Coalition for Israel wishes to express its solidarity with the Jewish communities in Europe after a neo-Nazi gunman attacked a synagogue in Halle, Germany on Wednesday leaving two people dead and two injured.
“It is a dark day for Germany and for Europe as a whole when Jews can no longer gather for prayer in their local synagogues on their holiest day in the year, Yom Kippur, without having to fear for their lives,” ECI Founding Director Tomas Sandell said in a statement. He continued, “Any deadly attack against Jewish targets needs to be condemned in the strongest possible way, but the fact that the perpetrators in yesterday’s attack were motivated by the same demonic ideology of National Socialism that only two generations ago led to the greatest crime against humanity shows that we are losing the fight against antisemitism.
“The rise of antisemitism has today reached such epidemic levels that it poses an existential threat to the very soul of Europe. We cannot build a future for Europe if we compromise with our foundations. As the new European Commission is being confirmed by the European Parliament in Brussels this week, they need to make the fight against antisemitism a top priority. ECI therefore calls upon the President designate of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen to immediately on her installation call together a European crisis summit in Brussels on the alarming rise of antisemitism.
“As we approach the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and the end of the Shoah we owe this to the six million Jews who were killed in the Nazi concentration camps for the simple fact that they were Jewish. Never again means now,” Sandell concluded.