“Mommy, mommy.” Five-year-old Betty Hyatt, then Betty Prins, frightened by the unfamiliar low, rumbling noises in the sky, jumped out of bed and ran screaming for her mother. It was early morning on Friday, May 10, 1940, the day she and her father were planning to travel to Holland to visit relatives.
Charlotte Seeman — then Charlotte Leiter — spotted the barbed-wire fence ahead. She and her companions — a young woman from Vienna as well as the woman’s boyfriend and uncle — climbed over and continued walking. It was a cold night in December 1939, and they had crossed the German border near the intersection of Belgium and Holland.
Chabad has opened a new synagogue and Jewish community center in Antwerp.
Belgium saw a 30-percent increase in the number of anti-Semitic complaints filed in 2012, according to a government agency.
On the third floor of the Belgian capital’s oldest Jewish school, Jacquy Wajc pauses to listen to the eerie silence that hangs in the hallways.
Belgian extreme-right and extreme-left activists participated in a demonstration in Antwerp where some participants reportedly called for Jews to be gassed.
Belgium’s recent local elections triggered “an unprecedented wave of manifestations of anti-Semitism,” according to the country’s organization of French-speaking Jews.
Dozens of haredi Orthodox schoolchildren participated in a Lag b\’Omer bonfire in Antwerp that featured the burning of an Israeli flag.
The Obama administration is reaping a whirlwind of criticism in the wake of pointed remarks about Israel by several U.S. officials over three days.
U.S. Ambassador to Belgium Howard Gutman will remain in his position, despite his statements that Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians is prompting some global anti-Semitism.
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