Anti-Semitism

Circumcision ban final straw for Danish Jews

Posted

COPENHAGEN, Denmark — In 2015, a jihadist gunned down a Jewish guard outside the city’s main synagogue, where Hannah Bentow was having her bat mitzvah party. Bentow and dozens of teenagers stayed inside as police pursued and later killed the man who killed Dan Uzan. Her sense of security as a Jew in Denmark was shattered.

But Bentow said her decision to leave for Israel as soon as she turns 18 was sealed by the steps taken this year toward banning nonmedical circumcision of boys. The Danish parliament is set to become the first in the European Union to vote on a nonbinding motion calling to prohibit the practice.

The ruling parties said they would oppose a ban, but the debate about it “makes me feel like I don’t belong, and like Denmark doesn’t want me to belong, either,” Bentow said.

Her words are echoed by many Danish Jews, who are questioning their future in a nation where they increasingly feel caught between Islamist extremism and the xenophobia it triggers. Denmark’s Jewish minority of 9,000 people is “so pressed already, with armed police at our school and armed troops at shul, this [debate on circumcision] is sucking the marrow out of wanting to be Jewish,” said Mette Bentow, Hannah’s mother.

The language of the pending motion on circumcision cites child welfare concerns. “The introduction of an 18-year minimum age for circumcision puts children’s interests and rights at the forefront,” the text states. It calls for up to six years in jail for anyone who performs a circumcision, and holds parents responsible whether the act happened in Denmark or not.

More than 50,000 people signed a petition on the Danish parliament’s website endorsing the text, which equates nonmedical circumcision of boys with female genital mutilation.

In Denmark and other European countries, campaigns to ban nonmedical circumcision of boys milah for Jews and khitan for Muslims — have been brewing for years.

But Danish activists saw a breakthrough, following a parliamentary amendment to bring to vote as a nonbinding draft motion any petition that receives 50,000 signatures within six months of its posting on the parliament’s website. The circumcision proposal cleared the hurdle in four.

To many Danish Jews, arguments about child welfare hide the real motivation: xenophobia. In addition to children’s welfare activists, “many others use the situation to show that they are against Jews, Muslims and they can express anti-Semitism and xenophobia without admitting to it,” Finn Rudaizky, a former leader of the Jewish community of Denmark, told JTA.

Anecdotal evidence seems to support his view.

Over the past decade, Denmark has developed some of Europe’s strictest immigration policies, which the Washington Post last year called “a Muslim ban [that] was just called something else.” In 2014, it outlawed the slaughter of animals without stunning them first, as required by Judaism and Islam. And in the 2015 elections, the Danish People’s Party, which the New York Times has labeled “far right,” emerged as the second largest in parliament.

That year, a Muslim cemetery was desecrated in Copenhagen, and a Danish man tried to burn down a mosque with dozens of worshippers still inside.

Against this backdrop, “the debate about circumcision in Denmark is definitely part of a bigger picture where xenophobia plays a role,” said Hagai Ben-Avraham, an Israel-born academic who has lived in Copenhagen for the past six years.

Whatever the forces driving the case against circumcision, the pending vote is causing Ruchama Elisabeth Munch — a 24-year-old Israel-born mother in Aarhus — to question her future in Denmark.

At the circumcision last year of their firstborn, Yoav, Munch said she and her husband invited only close family partly because they “didn’t feel comfortable” inviting non-Jews to a ceremony often characterized in the media as child abuse.

“But when we have more children, of course it will affect our decision whether to live here, if we get branded as criminals” over milah, she said.

In a 2016 survey among 1,027 adult Danes, 87 percent of respondents supported a ban on nonmedical circumcision of boys.

Amid the discomfort, Danish Jews are also adjusting to the new reality that followed the 2015 synagogue attack.

At the Chabad synagogue, machine gun-toting troops wearing bulletproof vests over camouflage fatigues gently tap their feet to the melody during Friday night services. They smile and joke with Rochel Loewenthal, the wife of the local Chabad rabbi, who offers them kosher chicken and hummus dip.

Security was at its peak last week during the annual Jewish Culture Festival. Eight police and soldiers were on hand at an attended by about 15 teenagers.

But Hannah Bentow, whose bat mitzvah was the target of the 2015 attack, doesn’t feel these measures are excessive. Weeks after the attack, someone smashed the window of Denmark’s only kosher shop and sprayed it with swastikas. It was attacked again in 2016. And last year, a 17-year-old Muslim girl was convicted of plotting to blow up the Jewish school from which Bentow recently graduated.

For Bentow and her younger brother, 8-year-old Elias, the 2015 attack “introduced fear into their lives,” Mette Bentow said. Elias asked his father to stop wearing his kippah in public.

Mette is deeply thankful for Danish society’s “embrace” of its Jews following the 2015 attack.

“I love Denmark, I love our royal house, I get goosebumps on national holidays,” she said, as she sat with her family around a table laden with sourdough Danish pastries. “But lately the more I live here, the more I get the feeling this is the wrong place to raise a Jewish family.”