Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu spoke with Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen over the weekend, thanking her for her “steadfast position in defense of the Jewish community and the ancient tradition of circumcision.”
As YWN reported last week, the Danish parliament was scheduled to vote on a bill banning bris milah in its next session and the country’s Jews were quite fearful about it passing. However, subsequent to the report, Frederiksen expressed her opposition to the bill, saying that “Danish Jews must continue to be part of Denmark.”
In an interview on Danish TV2 News on Thursday, Frederiksen said that “many Jews do not find it compatible to live in a country where circumcision is banned, and I simply do not think we can make a decision with which we do not live up to our promise – that the Jews will remain part of Denmark.”
Frederiksen was apparently referring to the fact that Danish citizens rose to the defense of the country’s Jews following Nazi Germany’s occupation of the country during the Holocaust. After Hitler ordered the arrest and deportation of the Danish Jews, the Danish resistance movement, aided by many hundreds of Danish boat owners, smuggled 7,220 of Denmark’s 7,800 Jews, plus 686 non-Jewish spouses, by sea to neutral Sweden.
Thanks to ordinary Danish citizens, 99% of Denmark’s Jewish population survived the Holocaust, including most of the 464 Danish Jews who were captured and sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Leading Danish civil servants interceded and persuaded the Germans to exchange some Jews for packages of food and medicine and persuaded them not to deport the remaining Jews to extermination camps.
Meanwhile, the Danish Red Cross monitored the condition of the Danish Jews at Theresienstadt and in April 1945, 425 Danish Jews were among several thousand Jews turned over by the Germans to the Swedish Red Cross and transported to Sweden. Yad Vashem has a record of only 102 Danish Jews who died during the Holocaust.
Netanyahu told Frederiksen that circumcision “is a matter of maintaining Jewish identity through the generations.” The prime minister also expressed his appreciation for “how the Danish people protected the Jewish community during and after the Holocaust.”
The Chabad shaliach in Copenhagen, Rabbi Yitzi Loewenthal, stated that Danish Jews “are grateful to the prime minister and others who have come out clearly against” the bill.
(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)
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2 Responses
1. The Danes only protected Danish Jews. They had no compunctions about handing over foreign Jews to the Germans. The same applies to the Bulgarians, who protected their own Jews but send all of Macedonia’s Jews to Auschwitz.
2. The evacuation from Denmark to Sweden was organized by the Gestapo. The head of the Gestapo in Denmark had received an order to empty Denmark of its Jews, and he decided the easiest way to do that was to get them all to leave the country voluntarily. So he sent his deputy to Sweden to arrange for them to be welcome there, and then he let word leak to the Jewish community that they were in danger and must flee, and that they’d be welcome in Sweden. Overnight the whole community fled, and he could report to Berlin that his mission was accomplished and there were no more Jews in Denmark.
I should hope the Danish government would stop such a bill for better reasons than just “Jews being compatible to live in Denmark”. Despite the ‘positive’ result, I should hope Jews still realise the incompatibility of continuing to live there. Today’s failed vote, is tomorrow’s passing bill.