The damaged monument from the children of the kindertransport to their parents at Prague train station
Anti-Semitism on rise in Czech Republic, report says
Federation of Jewish Communities says there were 694 anti-Semitic attacks in 2019 compared to 347 in previous year; most incidents registered on internet, often through disinformation websites, far-right media and BDS campaigns
PRAGUE - The number of anti-Semitic incidents in the Czech Republic doubled last year, the Jewish community said Wednesday.
In its annual report, the Federation of the Jewish Communities said there were 694 anti-Semitic attacks in 2019 compared with 347 in the previous year.
A majority of the attacks - 95% - were registered on the internet, often on disinformation websites, far-right media and produced by activists involved in an international campaign to boycott Israel.
The Jewish community said there were three attacks on Jewish property last year and six other incidents involved anti-Semitic threats, harassment and verbal insults. No physical attack was registered in 2019.
Prague Jewish community celebrates the Old-New Synagogue's first new Torah scrolls since the Holocaust, March 2017
In June 2019, an unknown attacker damaged a monument in Prague's main train station which children saved by Sir Nicholas Winton from Nazi death camps unveiled in 2017 to honor their parents.
The British civil servant arranged what came to known as the Czech kindertransport - eight trains carrying 669 children, most of them Jewish, from Czechoslovakia through Germany to Britain at the outbreak of World War II in 1939. He died in 2015 at age 106.
Tributes are laid at the statue of Sir Nicholas Winton in Prague train station following his death in 2015
(Photo: David Sedlecký/Wikimedia Commons)
The children were sent to foster parents. Back home, most of their parents died in the Holocaust.
The report, however, said the Czech Republic remains a safe country for Jews and anti-Semitism is at a relatively low level compared with other European countries.