(JTA) — Stickers shaped like the yellow stars that Nazis made Jews wear during the Holocaust were placed on multiple Jewish sites in Denmark and Sweden on the anniversary of the 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom.
In Denmark, the stickers were found on Saturday on the mailbox of Ella and Henrik Chievitz, a Jewish couple from Silkeborg, a town located 150 miles west of Copenhagen. They were also found on the home of a Jewish family in the Copenhagen area and on the Jewish cemetery of Randers, a town located some 30 miles north of Silkeborg, according to Rabbi Yitzi Loewenthal of Copenhagen. Dozens of headstones were vandalized at the cemetery.
In Sweden, similar stickers were found at the Bajit Jewish café near the Adat Jeshurun synagogue and also on the Great Synagogue of Stockholm.
Jewish buildings in Helsingborg, Sweden, where a Jewish woman was stabbed and severely injured earlier this year, and Norrkoping were also tagged with the stickers on Saturday, the 81st anniversary of the pogroms in Germany and Austria that marked the beginning of large-scale violence by Nazis against Jews.
Authorities in both countries are treating the stickers as anti-Semitic hate speech, according to Lowenthal and Aron Verstandig, president of the Council of Swedish Jewish Communities.
“It is no longer possible for anybody, Jew or non-Jew alike, to be shocked by the callous reminders unleashed against our communities in Scandinavia and elsewhere in Europe this past Shabbat that antisemitism is alive and well, and right at our doorsteps,” Ronald S. Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress, wrote in a statement. He called for “deliberate and targeted action.”
