Co-ordinated suicide attacks left 32 people dead at the airport and a metro station in Brussels. The incident continued a trend that has all Europeans worried, including, of course, its Jews, already specifically targeted in France, Belgium and Denmark.
Alongside an ongoing fear of Islamist attacks has been the question of how to respond to the refugee crisis, which has brought some terrorists into the Continent together with truly desperate people seeking to escape war.
By December 2016, Germany — with more than 1.3 million asylum applicants — had taken in the most refugees in Europe. German Jewish leaders, while expressing solidarity with those in need, urged the government to insist on “values education” for them — to root out anti-democratic, antisemitic, homophobic and misogynistic baggage they might have brought with them.
The refugee crisis was the biggest issue for Jewish communities across Europe and they debated the proper response to attacks by terrorists masquerading as refugees.
Meanwhile, these issues contributed to the rise of the political far-right across the continent, with extremist, anti-EU and anti-Muslim parties gaining ground in France, Holland, Germany, Poland, Austria, Italy, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and elsewhere. Jewish leaders continued to warn against joining hands with far-right parties that claim to support Jews and Israel while actually promoting xenophobic and antisemitic agendas.
The past year was a mixed bag in Poland: for the first time, the country offered to return homes in Warsaw to Holocaust survivors and their descendants. But critics also accused the country’s right-wing leaders of trying to wipe out the memory of Polish collaboration in the Holocaust.
Hungary, which also has been accused of trying to erase Shoah history, made a gesture by financially supporting the Oscar-winning Holocaust film Son of Saul.
Meanwhile, the mysterious disappearance of Raoul Wallenberg was resolved in 2016. The Swedish diplomat who saved thousands of Hungarian Jews died in a Soviet prison between the end of July 1947 and July 1953.
French Jews continued to lead in making aliyah. But, in January, a 40-year-old Israeli man became the first of his compatriots to take up Spain’s 2012 offer of citizenship to anyone who could prove they were descended from the country’s historic Sephardi community.