On December 17, 2012, the Simon Wiesental Center issued a travel advisory for Copenhagen and Denmark, following a warning by the Israeli Ambassador to Denmark, advising Israelis not to wear kippot, jewelry with religious symbols, or to speak Hebrew on the streets of the Danish capital. The advisory followed reports of physical attacks on Jews in Copenhagen. This in a country which throughout Nazi occupation during WWII treated their fellow Jewish citizens as equals. And in striking acts of courage and humanity, Danes saved all 7,500 Jews from certain death at the hands of the Nazis by spiriting them out to neutral Sweden. Norway had issued a travel warning already in 2006.

Last year the Central Council of Jews in Germany advised against wearing the traditional Jewish head covering in what they called “problematic areas,” later named as Muslim neighborhoods in Berlin and other large cities. http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/german-jews-advised-against-wearing-kippah-a-1020890.html  This year, the head of the Jewish Community in Marseille followed suit, sending out a warning after an attack on a teacher (although France’s head Rabbi Haim Korsia urged Jews not to follow that advice. http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/france-marseille-jews-urged-not-wear-skull-caps-public-1537608 .) Note, by the way, that many of us recoil at the idea of seeing people forced to give up their traditional religious clothing for fear of persecution, but have little to say about the state bans of wearing Hijab in many countries.

The lead montage is based on a photo taken at the Jewish Museum in Berlin (Albertine Mendelsohn-Bartholdy, by August Kaselewsky.) The museum’s paintings and photographs of middle class German Jews (see below, Max Slevogt, Familienbild Plesch 1928) bring home once again the striking fact how completely integrated and indistinguishable Jews were from the rest of the population  –  little did it do to prevent catastrophe.

Shout out to a Jewish Museum of our own: The Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education http://www.ojmche.org  – do yourself a favor and grab the last days of their current exhibit of photographs of photojournalist Ruth Gruber who was a twentieth-century pioneer. The photographs in this exhibition span more than fifty years, from her groundbreaking reportage of the Soviet Arctic in the 1930s and iconic images of Jewish refugees from the ship Exodus 1947, to her later photographs of Ethiopian Jews in the midst of civil war in the 1980s.