Courtesy of rovenko.com
Following the stabbing of an Orthodox Jew in Antwerp, a Belgian Jewish politician has demanded that the government pay for the community’s security costs of $1 million a year. Claude Marinower, Antwerp’s alderman for education, expressed the demand on Thursday – several days after 31-year-old Yehosha Malik was knifed in the neck by an unknown assailant while he was walking to synagogue to attend Shabbos prayer services.
“Jewish families should not have to cover these costs,” Marinower contended. “It is the government’s job to make sure its citizens can live in safety.”
As reported by JTA, Jewish families in Belgium pay $100 a month per each child they send to a Jewish public school to enable the school to cover the extra security measures judged as necessary by the community’s security officials.
The law in Belgium stipulates that education must be provided free of charge, as Belgium is a federal entity consisting of the Flemish region, whose capital is Antwerp, a French-speaking Walloon Region, and the autonomous Brussels region.
Throughout Belgium and a significant portion of Western Europe, Jewish communities are regularly targeted for violence by Islamists and Arabs desiring revenge for Israel’s actions and, less frequently, by anti-Semites from the extreme political right wing.
According to Marinower, Belgium has not risen to the level of other Western European countries that have agreed to cover security costs for Jewish communities, including Germany, Denmark and neighboring Netherlands.
It is true, though, that authorities in Antwerp ramped up security around the city’s heavily Jewish neighborhoods following the murder in May of four people at Brussels’ Jewish Museum of Belgium, including the installation of video cameras and an increase in police patrols.
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