This week’s terror attack in Vienna took the city by surprise. Unlike many other European cities, it has been largely spared from Islamic terror attacks until now, something Viennese Interior Minister Karl Nehammer emphasized following the attack. “We experienced an attack yesterday evening by at least one Islamist terrorist, a situation that we have not had to live through in Austria for decades,” he said.

This situation has led to at least some Jews in Vienna feeling very safe in the city, unlike other European cities such as Paris and Antwerp. Yoav Ashkenazy, a 38-year-old Israeli university student who has been living in Vienna for six years, said that he feels very safe in Vienna and he refuses to give in to fear.

“People walk around here with a kippah without any problem,” he told AFP. “Vienna is a city on a human scale, provincial and to the left… No one, not even from the Muslim community, even considers touching a hair on the head of a Jewish person.”

However, despite Ashkenazy’s sentiments, anti-Semitic instances, on the rise throughout Europe, have also increased in Austria, with 550 recorded in 2019, a figure that has doubled in five years, the AFP report said.

Some Jews say that they’ve personally experienced the rise of anti-Semitism in Austria, but they nevertheless still feel safe. Illya Babkin, a Jew who was born in Munich and is currently a student at the University of Vienna, told Arutz Sheva that he’s experienced a number of anti-Semitic incidents in Austria in the past year. “For example,” he said, “we were a group of Jewish students in the middle of the city and people stopped a car, opened a window, pointed a middle finger at us and cursed.”

Babkin related another anti-Semitic incident: “We passed near a demonstration related to the coronavirus and there were also groups of neo-Nazis and neo-fascists and people there who cheered ‘Heil Hitler’ and carried various problematic symbols.”

However, Babkin concluded: “It happens in Vienna and it happens all the time. But on the other hand, Vienna is still a quiet and safe place. A terrorist attack like this is not something that usually happens here, thank G-d.”

A terror attack occurred in the “Stadttempel,” the Viennese Jewish community’s main shul, in 1981, and for those old enough to remember the incident, this week’s terror attack brought back painful memories.

“[The attack] brings back tragic memories for us as one of the first attacks on Jewish targets in Europe happened at this very spot almost 40 years ago,” the European Jewish Congress stated on Tuesday.

(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)