Survivors and Jewish Leaders in Krakow Warn of Rising Antisemitism Across Europe

Regina Sluszny rolls her wheelchair through the iron gate at the entrance to the former Auschwitz concentration camp, her eyes on a grey horizon. She is 87. "I feel the cold, both physically and emotionally," she says. She has been here six, seven, maybe eight times, she estimates, and the same thoughts come each visit. She thinks of her husband's family, seven of whom were sent straight to the gas chambers and murdered here.

She made the journey to Poland with a delegation from the European Jewish Association, an advocacy group that represents Jewish interests in Europe and regularly organizes conferences on Jewish life as well as visits to former concentration camps. This year the group invited political representatives and members of Jewish communities to Krakow and Auschwitz on November 9 and 10, timing the trip to the anniversary of the November Pogroms of 1938. In those two days, Nazis burned synagogues, ransacked Jewish homes and businesses, and murdered Jews; around 30,000 Jewish men were deported to concentration camps. The event's motto was "Honoring the past, securing the future." Like many attendees, Sluszny fears the horrors of the Shoah are slowly slipping from Europe's collective memory.

The guest of honor was Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of Iran's last shah and a prominent opponent of the Islamic Republic. The association honored him for his efforts against antisemitism. Accepting the award, he recalled the historic ties between the Persian and Jewish peoples and urged democratic nations to unite against oppression and ideological extremism.

But in conversations around the symposium in Krakow, the fear people described was closer to home. Many spoke of growing hostility toward Jews and mounting anxiety in Jewish communities across Europe. The figures bear some of that out. French authorities recorded 1,320 antisemitic incidents in 2025, fewer than in 2024 but roughly three times the 2022 total. In Germany, police-recorded antisemitic crimes climbed from 2,641 in 2022 to 6,236 in 2024 and 6,548 in 2025. Authorities and monitoring groups across Europe have reported a significant rise in incidents since October 7, 2023.

For Ellen van Praagh, chair of the Interprovincial Rabbinate in the Netherlands, that date was a turning point. The Hamas-led attack killed around 1,200 people in Israel and saw more than 250 taken hostage to Gaza; she lost a family member in it. "My family has lived in the Netherlands since the 16th century. And now I'm being told to leave," she says. She describes a dramatically changed atmosphere and says she no longer feels safe as a Jew there. "We Jews are being held responsible for Israel's actions." Israel launched a major military offensive in Gaza after the attack, and more than 75,000 Palestinians have been killed since the war began, according to conservative estimates.

Van Praagh, like many at the symposium, says she is losing faith in politicians. In her view "Never Again" has become an empty phrase with little bearing on Jews' everyday lives. Communities now shelter behind high walls, and constant security measures restrict daily life. "That is not what we want. We want to live in freedom," she says.

Rabbi Menachem Margolin, the association's chairman, also pressed European leaders to take greater responsibility. He said he was grateful for their support, without which Jewish life in Europe would be hardly possible. Yet laws meant to protect Jewish life, he said, often go unenforced, and many officials hesitate to name antisemitism once doing so becomes politically inconvenient. "But Auschwitz did not begin with gas chambers. It began with words," he cautioned.

The delegation then gathered at the Birkenau memorial. The Nazis murdered around 1.1 million people at Auschwitz, approximately one million of them Jews, most at Birkenau. Survivors like Sluszny are increasingly rare. She lived because in 1942, when she was two, a family friend and his wife took her in while her parents fled the Nazis with her two brothers and went into hiding. For more than 40 years she has told her story to schoolchildren. For her, "Never Again" is a promise that must be kept, or it becomes a lie.

What to watch now is whether European governments enforce the protections already on the books and say the word antisemitism plainly, as delegates pressed them to do, while tensions over Gaza continue.