The number of anti-Semitic incidents documented in Swiss French-speaking cantons more than doubled in 2013, a local watchdog said. The Inter-Communitary Coordination Against Anti-Semitism and Defamation, or CICAD, documented 151 anti-Semitic incidents in 2013 compared to 87 in 2012, an increase of 73.5 percent, the group wrote in its annual report, published Thursday. The vast…
A city council member from Geneva has warned his municipality against allowing a public Hanukkah event, which he said would violate Swiss law. “I’m not afraid of being called anti-Semitic, because my request is not directed at a religious community [but at] the authorities, which do not comply with the law by issuing an authorization…
A Dutch court ordered the Anne Frank Foundation in Amsterdam to return archival material to a Swiss charity named for the teenage Jewish diarist. The Anne Frank Foundation must give back the archive to the Anne Frank Fund in Basel by Jan. 1, the Amsterdam District Court ruled on Wednesday. Since 2007, the archive has…
Swiss authorities turned away only 3,000 Jewish refugees during the Holocaust and not 24,500 as believed, French Nazi hunter and historian Serge Klarsfeld said. Klarsfeld told Switzerland’s Der Sonntag newspaper that the figure of 24,500 came from imprecise archive material processed by the authors of the 1999 Bergier report on Switzerland’s Holocaust-era record and called…
A Swiss army commander reportedly praised Nazi-era German general Erwin Rommel before a group of officers, holding up Rommel as an example for the Swiss army to follow. According to a report in the Swiss newspaper Der Sonntag, the officer, a lieutenant colonel identified only as “PL,” defended his words as “no praise for Rommel…
The body of the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat will be exhumed on Tuesday, eight years after his death, in an investigation to establish if he was murdered, a Palestinian official said on Saturday. A French court opened a murder inquiry in August into Arafat’s death in Paris after a Swiss institute said it had discovered…
Russia will join an international investigation to determine whether the first Palestinian president, Yasser Arafat, was murdered, the current Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, said on Sunday. French and Swiss experts are due to exhume Arafat’s body in Ramallah later this month in an attempt to discover how he died after an Al Jazeera documentary in…
A metal door set into a mountain in Switzerland offers a way out for fine art investors forced to pay over the odds to insure their collections. The doorway leads into a disused military bunker, one of several being sold off by the Swiss government and whose echoing, climate-controlled chambers, once used to stockpile munitions,…
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