Today is Yom HaShoah — Holocaust Remembrance Day — in the state of Israel. As the Jewish state does every year, sirens blasted throughout the land as Israelis came to a two-minute standstill to commemorate the six million Jews who were murdered by the genocidal Nazi regime of Germany.
In Europe, 10,000 marched today at Auschwitz-Birkenau as part of the annual “International March of the Living,” which describes itself as “an annual educational program, bringing individuals from around the world to Poland and Israel to study the history of the Holocaust and to examine the roots of prejudice, intolerance and hatred.” The March of the Living, which started in 1988, has had 260,000 unique individuals participate to-date — with those participants hailing from 52 distinct countries. The marchers always tread the same three-kilometer path at the concentration camp.
At today’s March in Poland, Jewish Agency for Israel Chairman Isaac Herzog issued a dire warning to European Jews. Standing in the backdrop of the most ruthlessly efficient death edifice mankind has ever constructed, Herzog bluntly warned that Jews in Europe are “once again unsafe on the streets.” He also mentioned the recent synagogue shootings in both Pittsburgh and San Diego. Per The Times of Israel:
As over 10,000 people joined in the 2019 International March of the Living on Thursday afternoon in the former Nazi death camp at Auschwitz, Jewish Agency Chairman Isaac Herzog warned that “Jews are once again unsafe on the streets of Europe.” …
“From this place, I call on world leaders to fight rampant anti-Semitism erupting around the world, especially the shocking and dramatic rise of hate crimes in Europe, Latin America, the United States and around the world,” Herzog, one of the few Israeli officials to attend this year, said at the gathering’s main ceremony.
“It is inconceivable that 74 years after that wretched war, Jews are once again unsafe on the streets of Europe. Jews cannot be murdered in Pittsburgh and San Diego or anywhere. Let us heed the warning and take to heart the lessons of the Holocaust. World leaders must unite with zero tolerance for hate crimes, of any kind,” he added.
The Daily Wire has frequently reported on the harrowing and dramatic rise of anti-Semitism in Europe over the past five to ten years. Here is how Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic put it in a lengthy, eye-opening 2015 essay entitled, “Is It Time for the Jews to Leave Europe?”:
[W]hat makes this new era of anti-Semitic violence in Europe different from previous ones is that traditional Western patterns of anti-Semitic thought have now merged with a potent strain of Muslim Judeophobia. Violence against Jews in Western Europe today, according to those who track it, appears to come mainly from Muslims, who in France, the epicenter of Europe’s Jewish crisis, outnumber Jews 10 to 1.
That the chief propagators of contemporary European anti-Semitism may be found in the Continent’s large and disenfranchised Muslim immigrant communities—communities that are themselves harassed and assaulted by hooligans associated with Europe’s surging right—is flummoxing… The failure of Europe to integrate Muslim immigrants has contributed to their exploitation by anti-Semitic propagandists and by recruiters for such radical projects as the Islamic State[.]