Religious Freedom Report Says Anti-Semitism Remains Global Problem
Image by Getty Images
Anti-Semitism “continued to be a major problem around the globe,” the U.S. State Department’s annual International Religious Freedom Report for 2014 found.
The 17th annual report, which was released Wednesday, noted that anti-Semitic incidents rose significantly in Western Europe during the 2014 Gaza War between Israel and Hamas as well as in eastern Ukrainian regions when Russian rebels forcefully annexed part of the territory. The number of incidents overall in France doubled last year, to 851, over 2013.
The report, which analyzed levels of religious freedoms in regions across the globe, also found in Israel “an increase in interethnic tension and violence involving different religious communities.”
In addition to the 2014 Gaza conflict, the report cited the attack on a synagogue in Jerusalem that left five dead along with the kidnapping and killing of three Jewish teenagers before the war as incidents that heightened tensions between Muslims and Jews in Israel during the year.
However, the report emphasized that “because religion, ethnicity, and nationality are closely linked in the Israel-Palestinian conflict, it was difficult to categorize many societal actions against specific groups as being solely based on religious identity.”
The report was the first presided over by Rabbi David Saperstein, who in January became the first non-Christian to hold the post of U.S. ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom.
“If you look at the Pew reports that I believe are a year behind our reports, over the last several years there’s been a steady increase in the percentage of people who live in countries that … have serious restrictions on religious freedom,” Saperstein said at a news conference Wednesday. “At the same time … we’ve seen enormous expansion of interfaith efforts on almost every continent to try and address the challenges.”
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
