Thread by @JewhadiTM

Brutal attack on Swedish woman sends shiver through tiny Jewish community timesofisrael.com/brutal-attack-… via @timesofisrael

Swedish Jews have reported intimidation and violence by far-right nationalists. But in the country’s south, many of the violent incidents – including the hurling of firebombs at the Gothenburg synagogue in 2017 – have come from immigrants from Arab or Muslim countries.

The Helsingborg Jewish community, a tight-knit group of fewer than 100 that increasingly over the past two years has operated independently from Malmo – has experienced some of that hostility.

“There is shock, confusion and a lot of fear in the Jewish community of Helsingborg,” Rabbi Shneur Kesselman, the Chabad movement’s emissary to the Malmo region, told JTA.

In Malmo, Kesselman personally has witnessed and experienced hundreds of anti-Semitic incidents, most of them verbal and almost all from immigrant families from the Middle East, he said.

About a third of Malmo’s population of 350,000 people are first- or second-generation immigrants from the Middle East, with large contingents from Iraq and Syria, according to Swedish government statistics.

Amnon Tsubari, a Malmo-based dual citizen of Israel and Sweden who on occasion has served as cantor at the synagogue, went further, saying “It’s more or less the same situation all over Sweden. The attacks are disturbing, shocking, but not surprising.”

Particularly in Sweden, he said, “there is a growing tendency, encouraged by some officials, to bundle Jews and Israel together, and then pretend opposition in Sweden is about Israel, Zionism — not Jews.”

(Sound familiar?)

cc: @RashidaTlaib @IlhanMN

Tsubari, a father of seven, said that regardless of developments and what is revealed in the investigation into the stabbing in Helsingborg, “I think the future of my children is in Israel.”