Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Muslim Protesters Decry ‘Jewish Murderers’ in Holland

Dozens of people chanted anti-Semitic slogans during riots that broke out in a predominantly-Muslim neighborhood of The Hague over the slaying of a suspect by police.

More than 100 people chanted about “Jewish murderers” on Thursday night in the Schilderswijk, a neighborhood where a handful of Jews live in a Jewish-owned enclave surrounded by project apartments populated by low-income families, according to a report on the The Post Online.

The riots took place at a theater stormed by protesters approximately a mile away from the enclave, the De Telegraaf daily reported.

More than 200 people were arrested since protests broke out in the Schilderswijk over the death of Mitch Henriquez, an Aruban citizen, at the hands of police officers who suffocated him during his arrest at a park.

The Schilderswijk has one of the highest crime rates in the Netherlands. Last year, the neighborhood saw riots that broke out on the margins of rallies in support of the ISIS terror group and featured its flags. Protesters hurled stones at riot police during an anti-ISIS march last year. During Israel’s war in Gaza, at least two demonstrations in Schilderswijk against Israel featured calls to slaughter the Jews.

The Jewish-owned enclave was purchased in the 19th century by the Jewish community to accommodate impoverished Jews fleeing pogroms in Eastern Europe. But the Jewish population of The Hague was almost totally annihilated during the Holocaust. The area around it became populated by families of migrant workers in the 1960s and 1970s. The city is now believed to have a few hundred Jews.

Lody van Der Kamp, a Dutch rabbi who has spoken out on the need to facilitate dialog between Muslims and Jews, wrote in an op-ed for the Joodse Omroep Jewish broadcaster Thursday that “when the calm returns, it is time to take these young men by the hand and show them their own Schilderswijk’s history.”

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

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at editorial@forward.com, subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.

Exit mobile version