Jewish & World News

The number of anti-Semitic incidents recorded in Switzerland has dropped from 36 in 2011 to 25 incidents last year. The figures were reported in the annual analysis on anti-Semitism by the Swiss Federation of Jewish Communities. The report states that unlike the previous year, no physical attacks against Jews were recorded in Switzerland in 2012 and that hostilities in Israel did not serve as “trigger events,” as has been observed in previous years.

The Swiss government knew about the Nazi program to wipe out Jews in 1942 -- earlier than previously known -- documents publicized by a Swiss television station suggest. A report aired by the German-language station SRF on Sunday, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, said the government was aware of German leader Adolf Hitler’s extermination plan and the existence of German concentration camps as early as 1942, the year that Germany decided on its so-called “final solution” for the Jews.

Austria's Jewish community (IKG) said recently it was working jointly with its German and Swiss counterparts to keep religious circumcision legal, after repeated calls for an end to the practice. The IKG was organizing an international coordinating group with the Jewish communities in neighboring Germany and Switzerland, IKG president Oskar Deutsch told the Austria Press Agency on Monday.

Switzerland’s oldest resident died peacefully in her sleep on Sunday, a few weeks before her 113th birthday. A spokeswoman for the old people’s home near Italian-speaking Lugano where she lived said Rosa Rein had fallen asleep during the afternoon, and had not woken up. On her 112th birthday Rein had told journalists she was in good health, although her sight and hearing were not as good as they had been, and she found walking increasingly difficult. Rein was born into a prosperous Jewish family in Upper Silesia – now part of Poland - on March 24 1897. She and her first husband, a German, emigrated to Brazil in 1938 as life for Jews became impossible in Nazi-ruled Germany. Her father died of disease, but her mother perished in a concentration camp. Rein’s husband died not long after they arrived in Brazil, and she remarried in 1949. She and her second husband moved to Paradiso on the outskirts of Lugano in 1964 for health reasons. She was widowed for a second time in 1973...