A view of Karolinska University Hospital in Sweden in 2017. (Wikimedia Commons)

(JTA) — A prestigious hospital near Stockholm unjustly fired a Jewish physician who had complained of antisemitic bullying by his superior, a local court ruled on Thursday, bringing what appears to be the end to a widely-covered affair that cast a spotlight on antisemitism in Sweden.

Karolinska University Hospital said it disputed the decision by the Labor Court of Sweden but would not appeal it.

The affair began in 2018, when a Jewish surgeon, who has asked to remain anonymous in court and media reports for career reasons and the possibility of family harassment, told reporters about the alleged antisemitic comments from a former department head at Karolinska.

Forwarding the News

Thoughtful, balanced reporting from the Forward and around the web, bringing you updated news and analysis each day.

Terms(Required)

I agree to the Forward's Terms of Service and Privacy Policy

Email(Required)

The former department head, named Inti Peredo, had allegedly been posting antisemitic caricatures and texts on Facebook. At around the same time, he demanded that the surgeon, a seasoned physician who was among just a handful of Jewish employees at the hospital and the only Jew working under Peredo, be assigned supervision while operating.

Peredo also flagged the surgeon to a review board as a risk to patient safety, citing reckless behavior, which the Labor Court said was a false accusation.

The surgeon contacted the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which protested what they and the surgeon said was antisemitic persecution at the workplace. Peredo resigned from that position and was reassigned. The surgeon, meanwhile, was fired last year. The hospital cited “difficulties to cooperate” on the part of the surgeon.

Following the dismissal, the Medical Association of Sweden, a workers’ union, sued the hospital for wrongful termination due to the surgeon’s ethnicity. The court accepted its claim that the dismissal was illegal and discriminatory, the Dagens Nyheter newspaper reported, and the hospital was ordered to reinstate the surgeon and pay him about $121,000 in damages.

In publicly disputing the ruling, a spokesperson said that the hospital isn’t appealing only because “we know that if we were to contest, it would be a lengthy legal process,” which “would not be healthy for either party.”

Asked on Thursday whether Karolinska would have done anything differently, a spokesperson for the hospital told Dagens Nyheter: “We have done everything we could.”

The affair at Karolinska unfolded amid effort to address the antisemitism problem of Sweden, where 27% of all religious hate crimes in 2020 targeted Jews, even though their minority of 20,000 people makes up 0.1% of the population. The attacks come from neo-Nazis as well as Muslim immigrants.

Last year, Sweden’s then-Prime Minister Stefan Lofven hosted media giants and foreign dignitaries in Malmo at a conference on fighting antisemitism. He urged internet companies such as Twitter and Meta to do more to stop the spread of hatred of Jews online.

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

2X match on all Passover gifts!

$90 → $180 $180 → $360

$360 → $720

Other amount