Belgian police have demanded that Lola, a theatre-starring donkey, be removed from the balcony of a cultural centre in Brussels after neighbours complained about her braying. Lola is staying on the first-floor balcony while she performs in a play at the Arab Cultural Centre, located in the same building in the Belgian capital. Staff had…
A Belgian student association passed a motion in favor of an academic boycott of Israel. In a vote held last month, 85 percent of the voters at a general council of the Federation of French-speaking Students in Belgium, or FEF, supported a motion which called for “a freezing of relations with Israeli universities,” the Belgian…
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…
Belgium saw a 30-percent increase in the number of anti-Semitic complaints filed in 2012, according to a government agency. Edouard Delruelle, president of the Centre for Equal Opportunities and Opposition to Racism, a Belgian government agency, said his organization documented 88 complaints of anti-Semitism in 2012, compared to 62 the previous year and 57 the…
A float satirizing local politicians dressed as Nazis holding canisters of Zyklon B gas is to take part in a carnival parade in the Belgian city of Aalst. The float, which also features a railway wagon and a political leader dressed as Hitler, was featured on the Facebook page of a group called FTP. The…
As the sister of Belgium’s most powerful Nazi, Madeleine Cornet knew better than to inquire about the ethnicity of the three women she hired as housemaids in October 1942. Cornet did not want to further implicate herself by hearing what she already knew: Her new hires were Jews who managed to escape the deportations that…
A Belgian Senate committee adopted a resolution acknowledging the country’s complicity in the murder of Jews during the Holocaust. The Senate’s committee on institutional affairs voted in favour of the resolution on Jan. 9, according to Belga, a local news agency. “Some Belgian authorities practiced collaboration unfitting of a democracy,” the resolution read, “with tragic…
A Belgian court ordered a Jewish school for girls to admit two boys or face heavy fines. If the Benoth Jeruzalem school in Antwerp fails to admit the boys, it will have to pay $2,600 for every day that the two boys are not allowed to study there, a Belgian judge ruled on Dec. 21,…
