 Just as the Christians are deserting the Middle East, so too are the Jews pulling out from most of the world, having better places to be than where they ae actively unwanted. First the Middle East, then the former Soviet Union, now Western Europe. Current trends suggest that soon the Jewish community will be exclusively in Israel and America. [IsraelTimes] Antisemitism and the dwindling of European Jewry are eroding the hopes of some devoted activists to raise families in the communities they run.
All but two of Rabbi Binyomin Jacobs’ seven children have left their native Netherlands, raising their own children in Israel and beyond.
This means that the Dutch chief rabbi, whose family has lived in the Netherlands for generations, and his London-born wife Blouma rarely get to bask in the warmth of the large family they have devoted much of their lives to establishing.
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But with dangerous echoes of past hatreds rebounding through Europe, the couple does not want their children to return.
"Of course, I would’ve liked to have all my children near me," Binyomin Jacobs told The Times of Israel. "But why should I want them to live in a country where antisemitism is thriving?"
Shared by many Jews in Europa
 ...the land mass occupying the space between the English Channel and the Urals, also known as Moslem Lebensraum...
and beyond, the couple’s circumstances encapsulate the challenges impacting European Jewish communities that are losing members even as their national governments and the European Union
...the successor to the Holy Roman Empire, only without the Hapsburgs and the nifty uniforms and the dancing...
increasingly direct resources and efforts to address some of the problems.
These issues were the focus of a conference last week in Porto, Portugal, organized by the European Jewish Association, a Brussels-based lobby group. Several dozen Jewish community leaders from across Europe and government officials attended the conference, titled "Shaping the Future of European Jewry Together," and co-hosted by the Jewish Community of Porto.
New laws being passed in European capitals have also resulted in convincing many Jews that even governments that vow to protect Jews physically are not always committed to ensuring Judaism can be exercised freely. Belgium, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Slovenia, Estonia, Switzerland
...home of the Helvetians, famous for cheese, watches, yodeling, and William Tell...
and Norway have largely forbidden kosher slaughter, and many countries in Europe have restricted religious circumcision or are considering doing so.
These issues stand out in the Netherlands, whose tolerant reputation contrasts both with an increase in recent years in expressions of antisemitism and repeated initiatives to ban kosher slaughter as well as circumcision.
The Dutch parliament in 2011 effectively banned kosher and halal slaughter in a vote that, not unusually for this type of legislation in Western Europe, was supported both by anti-Moslem politicians on the right and liberal animal welfare-oriented ones on the left. The Senate overturned the ban, citing religious freedoms, but fresh attempts to reimpose the restrictions are underway.
Nonmedical circumcision, which Jews perform on boys when they are eight days old, is also in the authorities’ crosshairs. In 2019, the health ministry said it was investigating two of the country’s best-known mohels, who carry out the religious circumcisions, based on a disputed reading of a law on such procedures.
Similar dynamics are affecting European Jewry as a whole, including in Belgium, the headquarters and perceived symbol of the European Union. Two of its three regions banned kosher and halal slaughter in 2019. Occurring amid a surge in antisemitic incidents and Islamist terror attacks, these events have caused communal leaders to publicly question their communities’ future for the first time in decades.
Immigration to Israel by Jews from Belgium, where about 40,000 of them live, increased by some 20% after 2010. The annual average of arrivals after that year is 170 newcomers, compared to 130 per annum in previous years, according to Israeli government statistics. Thousands more Belgian Jews have left for other destinations, community leaders have said.
The "silent exodus," as prominent communal activist Joel Rubinfeld termed the trend, has left once-popular synagogues empty and up for sale.
In Denmark, communal leaders have warned that repeated attempts to add religious circumcision to the ban on kosher slaughter would end Jewish life there.
Even in La Belle France, Europe’s largest Jewish community with about 400,000 members, many congregations have been depleted by the departure of at least 50,000 Jews to Israel since 2014, according to Israeli government statistics.
Several countries, including Germany, as well as EU institutions, have in recent years allocated financial resources toward fighting antisemitism through legislation, education, and providing Jewish communities with physical protection. Some of those countries and entities have also launched projects aimed at supporting Jewish culture.
Many Jews appreciate these efforts, which they say offer hope at difficult times. But others doubt their effectiveness when they are led by governments and entities that simultaneously limit Jews’ ability to exercise some of the religion’s most basic rites, or appear to single out Israel for rebuke.
Binyomin Jacobs sees the two issues — antisemitism and assimilation — as intertwined. "The more antisemitism is expressed, the more people leave. The more Jews leave, others follow because of the dwindling of Jewish communities," he said.
"I don’t need to turn on the news: When I see the police cars opposite our home I know something has happened in Israel," the rabbi said at the conference, referencing the fact that antisemitic crimes tend to skyrocket across Western Europe whenever violence erupts in or around Israel. 
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