Mick Hartley

Holland's Nieuw Israelietisch Weekblad (NIW), the world’s second-oldest still-running Jewish publication, is now published between blank sheets "for security reasons". From the JC:

Likely the only Dutch publication receiving this treatment, the NIW’s concealment encapsulates the reality of its intended readership: Members of a proud and prosperous minority that is gradually being stripped of its voice and confidence by the resurgence of antisemitism.

“I’ve always opposed this move whenever it came up in internal discussions because it’s symbolic: We’re proud Dutch Jews and we don’t want to hide,” Esther Voet, the paper’s longtime editor-in-chief, told JNS in a recent interview in her canal-side home in Amsterdam.

But after October 7, “readers were afraid. They told us: ‘I don't want my neighbours to know that I'm Jewish at this time’,” she added.

Some subscribers to the NIW worried not only about their neighbours, but also the postal carriers.

“That’s the reality we live in, and the cover concealment is the least of it,” Voet said.

Then there was the violence last November, when Israeli soccer fans returning from a Maccabi Tel Aviv match in Amsterdam, in what NIW and others termed the first antisemitic pogrom in the Netherlands since the Second World War, were set on by gangs of youths – a pogrom widely blamed across the left media on those nasty football fans stirring up trouble.

On the night of the violence, Voet opened up her centrally located home and turned it into a safehouse for Israelis who were looking for sanctuary. Jewish community volunteers brought them to Voet or directed them to her via WhatsApp messages. Bart Schut, the newspaper’s deputy editor in chief, also brought Israelis in need to Voet’s home.

Not far from her home, which is in the same neighbourhood as the Anne Frank House, anti-Israel gangs patrolled the streets, some of them pushing victims into the icy canal waters and conducting passport checks that ended in savage beatings of anyone deemed to be Israeli.

“You know, I was always aware that a time like this could come. Any Dutch Jew with any historical awareness must be,” Voet told JNS, referencing how, during the war, the Nazis and their collaborators murdered at least 75 per cent of Dutch Jewry.

“But to actually see the fear in the eyes of Jews hiding in my home, nothing prepares you for that,” she said.

This, and other experiences with antisemitism, has made Voet “very pessimistic about the future of Jews in Europe. Because, clearly, the silent majority has expressed itself: It has chosen to remain silent”.