27% of religious hate crimes in Sweden target its tiny Jewish community
Swedish police are seen at the scene where a Jewish woman was stabbed in Helsingborg, Sweden, May 14, 2019. (Screenshot from Aftonbladet)
(JTA) — Antisemitic incidents accounted for 27% of all religious hate crimes in 2020 in Sweden, where Jews make up 0.1% of the population.
Hate crimes against Muslims, who make up at least 8% of the population, accounted for 51% of the hate crimes against religious groups documented by police in 2020, according to a Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention report published last month. Anti-Christian hate crimes accounted for 11% of hate crimes targeting religious groups.
In absolute numbers, 170 antisemitic hate crimes and 328 anti-Muslim crimes were documented in 2020.
The remaining 12% of hate crimes involving religion were either against members of other religions, or within the same religion, the report said.
The Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention publishes a hate crime report every other year. Although antisemitism figures in the 2020 report are significantly lower than the 280 incidents reported in 2018, the Council cautioned about structural changes in the latest report and warned that there that may not be any decrease in the actual prevalence of antisemitic crimes.
Crimes related to religion accounted for 638, or 18%, of the total amount of incidents deemed hate crimes in Sweden in 2020.
Racist incidents against Black people accounted for 15%, or 3,398 hate crimes. Attacks on the LGBT population were 8% of the total.
Incidents included in the 2020 report included a gathering of far-right activists outside a synagogue in Norrköping on Yom Kippur. Men waved Nordic Resistance Movement flags outside the synagogue, which was empty at the time. In recent years, Jewish leaders in Sweden have warned that their community is under threat both from the far-right and from Muslim extremists.
Sweden, a nation of some 10 million people, has about 14,900 people who self-identify as Jews, according to a 2020 demographic study of European Jewry.
—
The post 27% of religious hate crimes in Sweden target its tiny Jewish community appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
