Abstract: About 29,000 self-identifying Jews live in Belgium today, constituting 0.25% of Belgium’s population. Adding people with familial ties to Jews, who are entitled to settle in the State of Israel under its Law of Return, brings the total to 46,000 people (0.4%);
The Jewish population of Antwerp (56% of the whole) is now larger than the Jewish population living in and around Brussels (39%). 63% of the Jews living in Antwerp identify as Haredi, with a further 19% identifying as Orthodox. In Brussels, Haredi and Orthodox Jews make up only 4% of the Jewish community – the rest are mainly traditional, progressive or ‘just Jewish’;
At present, the Jewish population of Brussels is experiencing close to zero growth, while the Jewish population of Antwerp has a significant excess of births over deaths;
The proportion of Belgian Jewish adults with a university education (80%) is twice as high as that found in the general population. This pattern, and scale of difference, are observed in many Jewish populations around the world.
About half of all Jews in Belgium reported that they had experienced antisemitic harassment over the previous twelve months (48%). About one-third of Belgian Jews reported that they had experienced antisemitic discrimination over the same period. They are much less likely to report antisemitic vandalism (2%) or physical attacks (4%).
Abstract: Objective: To explore determinants of participation in breast cancer screening in orthodox Jewish women living in Antwerp, Belgium, and to uncover their opinions and attitudes towards screening, and thereby to detect ways to optimize participation. Study design: Focus group discussions were performed during the last months of 2011 and the first half of 2012 to explore motivation to participate or not in breast cancer screening. Groups consisted of five to seven women. Inclusion criteria were: being female, considering oneself as orthodox Jewish, aged between 50 and 69 years. Results: Three focus group discussions with in a total of 20 women had taken place. All participants in the focus group discussions had a screening mammography taken on a regular base. All participants agreed that the social cohesion between Jewish orthodox women and the importance that is given to healthcare within the Jewish tradition are important contributors to their participation in a breast cancer screening program. Pain, lack of information during the exam, lack of confidence in the quality of the exam, perceived problems when the examining doctor/technician is male, and fear of the results are mentioned as barriers. The participants, however, state that these were not important enough to result in non-participation. Barriers could be diminished by information sessions specifically aimed at orthodox Jewish women. Conclusion: This qualitative research demonstrates a generally positive attitude of orthodox Jewish women living in Antwerp, Belgium, towards mammographic breast cancer screening. Increased and repeated structured information sessions are likely to improve breast cancer awareness in this population.
Abstract: In liberal democracies, fundamental rights and freedoms can conflict, and if they do, it is not always clear which right the state should prioritize. Should the right of parents to choose education in line with their own convictions prevail, or should the right of children to be prepared for a future life in a liberal democratic society be given more moral weight? While the former might lead to establishing and subsidizing orthodox religious schools, the latter implies “liberal”, “autonomy-facilitating” education. In order to make this tension concrete, we focus on a case study of an ultra-orthodox Jewish (Haredi) school in Flanders (Belgium), where “controversial issues” are excluded from the curriculum and where education is not fully in line with the core principles of “liberal education”. Subsequently, we explore the legal educational context in liberal democracies, with a particular focus on the freedom of religion and education. Then, we scrutinize several arguments for or against ultra-orthodox faith-based schools. We conclude that there are no convincing arguments for state support for these kinds of schools and that the recent Flemish policy of homeschooling might be a reasonable alternative, wherein a balance is found between children’s rights and parental rights
Author(s): Vanhamel, Jeff; Meudec, Maria; Van Landeghem, Ella; Ronse, Maya; Gryseels, Charlotte; Reyniers, Thijs; Rotsaert, Anke; Ddungu, Charles; Manirankunda, Lazare; Katsuva, Deogratias; Koen, Peeters Grietens; Nöstlinger, Christiana
Abstract: Background
The importance of community involvement in the response against disease outbreaks has been well established. However, we lack insights into local communities’ experiences in coping with the current COVID-19 pandemic. This study explored both the impact of, and response to, COVID-19 within the Orthodox Jewish communities of Antwerp (Belgium) during the first lockdown period (March 2020 – May 2020).
Methods
We conducted an explorative qualitative study using a participatory approach. First, we performed a community mapping to identify relevant stakeholders. Through the active involvement of a community advisory board and based on qualitative interviews with key-informants and community members, we elicited lived experiences, attitudes, and perceptions towards COVID-19. Interviews were conducted both face-to-face and using online web conferencing technology. Data were analyzed inductively according to the principles of thematic analysis.
Results
Government-issued outbreak control measures presented context-specific challenges to the Orthodox Jewish communities in Antwerp. They related mainly to the remote organization of religious life, and practicing physical distancing in socially and culturally strongly connected communities. Existing community resources were rapidly mobilized to adapt to the outbreak and to self-organize response initiatives within communities. The active involvement of community and religious leaders in risk communication proved to be of great importance to facilitate the coverage and uptake of pandemic control measures while protecting essential community values and traditions. Creating bottom-up and community-adapted communication strategies, including addressing language barriers and involving Rabbis in the dissemination of prevention messages, fostered a feeling of trust in government’s response measures. However, unmet information and prevention needs were also identified, such as the need for inclusive communication by public authorities and the need to mitigate the negative effects of stigmatization.
Conclusion
The experiences of Orthodox Jewish communities in Antwerp demonstrate a valuable example of a feasible community-centered approach to health emergencies. Increasing the engagement of communities in local decision-making and governance structures remains a key strategy to respond to unmet information and prevention needs.
Abstract: This study, the first to assess mortality among Jews around the world during the COVID-19 crisis, draws on data from a wide variety of sources to understand the extent to which Jews were affected by coronavirus in different parts of the world during the first wave of the pandemic, March to May 2020.
The first section describes the methods of quantification of COVID-19 mortality, and explains why measuring it using the excess mortality method is the most effective way to understand how Jewish communities have been affected. The second section presents data on Jewish mortality during the first wave of the COVID-19 epidemic, drawing particularly on data provided to JPR by Jewish burial societies in communities all over the world. It does so in a comparative perspective, setting the data on Jews alongside the data on non-Jews, to explore both the extent to which Jews have been affected by the COVID-19 epidemic, and how the Jewish experience with COVID-19 compares to the experience of non-Jewish populations.
The immediate impression is that there is not a single ‘Jewish pattern’ that is observable everywhere, and, with respect to the presence of excess mortality, Jewish communities, by and large, followed the populations surrounding them.
The report cautions against speculation about why Jews were disproportionately affected in some places, but rule out two candidate explanations: that Jewish populations with particularly elderly age profiles were hardest hit, or that Jews have been badly affected due to any underlying health issue common among them. They consider the possibility that Jewish lifestyle effects (e.g. above average size families, convening in large groups for Jewish rituals and holidays), may have been an important factor in certain instances, noting that these are unambiguous risk factors in the context of communicable diseases. Whilst they suggest that the spread of the virus among Jews “may have been enhanced by intense social contact,” they argue that without accurate quantification, this explanation for elevated mortality in certain places remains unproven.
The report also includes a strongly worded preface from Hebrew University Professor Sergio DellaPergola, the Chair of the JPR European Jewish Demography Unit, and the world’s leading expert in Jewish demography. In it, he stresses the importance of systematically testing representative samples of the population at the national and local levels, and, in Jewish community contexts, of routinely gathering Jewish population vital statistics. He states: “If there is one lesson for Jewish community research that emerges out of this crisis it is that the routine gathering of vital statistics – the monitoring of deaths, as well as births, marriages, divorces, conversions, immigrants and emigrants – is one of the fundamental responsibilities community bodies must take.”
Abstract: Feminist research into the position and participation of women in contemporary fundamentalist and traditionalist identity movements shows how essentialist ideologies of sexual difference are often deployed in critique of western secular liberal feminism. In this article the author draws a comparison between discourses of belonging according to studies of ba'alot teshuvahin the USA (female “returnees” to an Orthodox Jewish lifestyle), and her own interviews with “frumfrom birth” women (raised as haredi) in the strictly Orthodox Jewish community of Antwerp, Belgium. Whereas for the former, a rhetoric of choice, essentialism, and religious ideologies of female superiority appeared important, for the frum-born women, gender is more a question of orthopraxis and religious role equivalence. Nevertheless, the author argues that for the strictly Orthodox Jewish diasporic community in question, an increase in gender conservatism, with particular notions of female sexuality and modesty, goes hand in hand with isolationism vis-à-vis the surrounding secular society.
Abstract: This paper analyzes the challenges embedded in the conflict between the right to accessible education, which implies a prohibition on discriminatory practices in school admission, and the right to adaptable education, which accommodates children’s cultural affiliations. It shows that a normative lens, which examines the ways by which legal rules correspond to conflicting rights and interests, cannot fully capture the tension between legal prohibitions on discrimination in education and the sociocultural norms in religious communities. Thus, the paper offers a socio-legal lens, which focuses on the context of admission policies to Jewish religious schools. Based on three test cases of admission policies to Jewish religious schools in Israel, England, and Flanders, Belgium, the paper demonstrates how the legal rules regulating the admission policies are influenced by social forces. In Israel and England, these forces have facilitated a descent down slippery slope, originating with religious criteria, but concluding with discriminatory criteria. They also shaped admission practices reflecting the asymmetric power relations between the institutional school systems and individual families. The paper highlights the benefits of the Belgian policy, which proscribes religious classification of school candidates. This policy circumvents the ambiguous distinction between religion, ethnicity, and social class, and expands educational choices.
Abstract: Objectives. In Belgium, dominant ideological traditions – Christianity and non-religious humanism – have the floor in debates on euthanasia and hardly any attention is paid to the practices and attitudes of ethnic and religious minorities, for instance, Jews. This article aims to meet this lacuna.
Design. Qualitative empirical research was performed in the Orthodox Jewish community of Antwerp (Belgium) with a purposive sample of elderly Jewish (non-)Hasidic and secularised Orthodox women. In-depth interviews were conducted to elicit their attitudes towards (non-)voluntary euthanasia and assisted suicide.
Results. The research reveals diverse views among women in the community on intentionally terminating a patient's life. Absolute rejection of every act which deliberately terminates life is found among the overwhelming majority of (religiously observant) Orthodox (Hasidic and non-Hasidic) women, as they have an unconditional faith and trust in God's sovereign power over the domain of life and death. On the other hand, the views of secularised Orthodox women – mostly irreligious women, who do not consider themselves Orthodox, thus not following Jewish law, yet say they belong to the Orthodox Jewish community –show an acceptance of voluntary euthanasia and assisted suicide but non-voluntary euthanasia is approached more negatively. As they perceive illness and death as merely profane facts, they stress a patient's absolute right towards self-determination, in particular with regard to one's end of life. Among non-Hasidic Orthodox respondents, more openness is found for cultivating a personal opinion which deviates from Jewish law and for the right of self-determination with regard to questions concerning life and death. In this study, these participants occupy an intermediate position.
Conclusion. Our study reveals an interplay between ethical attitudes on euthanasia and religious convictions. The image one has of a transcendental reality, or of God, has a stronger effect on one's (dis)approval of euthanasia than being (ir)religious.
Abstract: Sinds het voorjaar van 2002 wordt Antwerpen beschouwd als een lokale conflicthaard voor een internationaal conflict. Naar aanleiding van een aantal gewelddadige confrontaties tussen ‘joden’ en ‘moslims’ werd erop gewezen dat het Israëlisch-Palestijns conflict ook in Antwerpen voet aan grond begon te krijgen. Het gevolg daarvan zou onder andere, een toenemend antisemitisme zijn vanwege ‘islamitische’ allochtonen. De verklaringen voor de spanningen tussen beide geloofsgemeenschappen moeten volgens zowel politiek als media worden gezocht in het Israëlisch-Palestijns conflict. Antwerpse ‘moslims’ zouden sympathiseren met hun Palestijnse ‘broeders’ en hun frustratie uitwerken op hun ‘joodse’ stadsgenoten. Het transfereren van een internationale naar een lokale Antwerpse context werd gemeenzaam ‘de import van het Israëlisch-Palestijns conflict’ genoemd.
In het kader van een licentiaatverhandeling werd deze vermoedelijke identificatie onder de loep genomen. De nadruk lag daarbij niet op het geweld of op de aanwezige ‘import’ maar op de ‘joodse’ en ‘islamitische’ gemeenschappen in Antwerpen. Dit onderzoek vertrekt van de autobiografie van Dyab Abou Jahjah, ‘Tussen twee werelden. Roots van een vrijheidsstrijd’. Tijdens een reeks groepsgesprekken met zowel leden van de Antwerpse ‘joodse’ als ‘islamitische’ gemeenschappen, trachtten we te achterhalen hoe de respondenten zichzelf omschreven, hoe ze de ‘andere’ (‘joden’ of ‘moslims’) definieerden en in welke mate het Israëlisch-Palestijns conflict daar een rol bij speelde. We focusten daarbij vooral op etnische, nationale en religieuze aspecten van hun identiteit. De respondenten werden geselecteerd op basis van hun lidmaatschap van politiek-ideologische, religieuze of jongeren- of vrouwenorganisaties, al bleek het een moeilijke opdracht om organisaties te vinden die bereid waren mee te werken en tegelijkertijd binnen dit profiel pasten. De deelnemende organisaties aan ‘joodse’ kant (B’Nai B’Rith, Unie der Joodse Jongeren van Antwerpen, Women’s International Zionist Organisation –WIZO- en WIZO Informatiegroep Midden-Oosten) waren allemaal zionistische organisaties en kunnen bijgevolg allemaal als politiek-ideologisch worden gelabeld, terwijl een religieuze organisatie ontbreekt. De ‘islamitische’ organisaties (Arabisch-Europese Liga, El Moustaqbal, Jongeren voor Islam en Student Focus) daarentegen vormen wel een correct staal.
De gesprekken maakten ons duidelijk dat identiteiten, zowel bij ‘joden’ als ‘moslims’, geplaatst moeten worden binnen de context. Los van de gegeven conflictsituatie lijkt identiteit een moeilijk te definiëren begrip te zijn. De respondenten wijzen zelf op verschillende deelidentiteiten, al blijkt meestal toch één subidentiteit te overheersen. De ‘joodse’ respondenten wezen zonder meer op een sterke band met het ‘thuisland’ Israël. De ‘islamitische’ respondenten legden de nadruk op hun religieuze overtuiging, al blijkt bij de Arabisch-Europese Liga de Arabische nationale identiteit te overheersen. In die zin vertonen de standpunten van de ‘joodse’ respondenten structurele gelijkenissen met deze van de AEL. Beide hechten vooral belang aan de natie(staat), respectievelijk Israël en de Arabische natie. Bij de overige ‘islamitische’ respondenten blijkt het niet zozeer hun identiteit te zijn die de identificatie bepaalt, maar eerder de aanwezigheid van onderdrukking (i.e. een conflictsituatie). Deze ‘moslims’ identificeren zich met de Palestijnen omdat er sprake is van onderdrukking. De identificatie wordt versterkt door de gemeenschappelijke Arabische etnische afkomst of religieuze overtuiging. Zonder deze conflictsituatie zou de band hoogstwaarschijnlijk minder sterk zijn.
Daarnaast blijkt dat de etnische en religieuze identiteiten van zowel ‘joden’ als ‘moslims’ niet voor iedereen dezelfde betekenis hebben. Terwijl voor de ene het ‘joods-zijn’ enkel en alleen een religieuze overtuiging is, verwijst de andere naar de ‘joden’ als “één religie, één nationaliteit, één volk” . Hetzelfde geldt voor de ‘islamitische’ respondenten. De islam lijkt voor een aantal respondenten hun Marokkaanse etniciteit te vervangen, terwijl anderen ook daar enkel en alleen het religieuze in zien. De Marokkaanse herkomst verdwijnt binnen deze context vaak naar de achtergrond.
Wanneer we beide partijen naar hun mening over elkaar peilden, leek die vooral te worden bepaald door stereotypen en vooroordelen. Oude stereotypen zoals de ‘jood’ als ‘rijke machtswellusteling’ bestaan nog steeds, maar ook ‘moslims’ worden al te vaak beschreven als ‘terroristen’. Uit de gesprekken blijkt dat het niet enkel het Israëlisch-Palestijns conflict is dat de standpunten van beide partijen bepaalt, maar dat die moeten gesitueerd worden binnen een breder perspectief. De polarisatie duidt eerder op een ruimere identificatie, namelijk het joods-christelijke Westen tegenover het Arabisch-islamitsche Oosten. Het gebruik van termen als ‘import’ of ‘verbinnenlandsing’ geeft volgens ons bijgevolg een vertekend beeld over deze identificatieprocessen. De respondenten van dit onderzoek zijn zélf het product van deze geglobaliseerde samenleving. Hun identiteiten worden dan ook gevormd door deze ‘postnationale samenleving’, waar conflicten in een ander werelddeel zelfs in Antwerpen voor beroering kunnen zorgen. Deze identificatie blijft bijgevolg niet enkel beperkt tot Antwerpse ‘moslims’, maar geldt evengoed voor de ‘joodse’ respondenten. Het verschil tussen de ‘joodse’ en de ‘islamitische’ respondenten ligt in de manier waarop ze daar elk mee omgaan. Terwijl de ‘joden’ zich engageren in Israël zélf, trachten de ‘moslims’ hun standpunten te verdedigen in Antwerpen. We prefereren bijgevolg het begrip ‘transnationale solidariteit’ in plaats van het ‘importeren’ van een conflict. Het ‘importeren’ legt ons inziens te veel de nadruk op de grenzen van de traditionele natiestaat, terwijl uit onze gesprekken blijkt dat deze meer en meer aan belang moet inboeten. We kunnen ons niet langer opsluiten in ons eigen dorp of onze eigen natiestaat, nu de wereld zélf een dorp geworden is…
Abstract: In this paper, Vollebergh investigates the commitment to establishing intercultural encounters by so-called ‘active’ white Flemish residents in Antwerp, and their perpetual disappointment with the responses of their neighbours of orthodox Jewish and Moroccan backgrounds. Instead of viewing these relationships either as a product of culturalist social cohesion policies, or as a vernacular ethical achievement that escapes culturalist politics, she argues that we should understand them through the figure of the Neighbour. Combining the theories of Emmanuel Levinas and Slavoj Žižek, she suggests that the neighbourly relation is a paradox in which the Neighbour as a nearby Other induces both an ethical desire for total openness in the engagement with this Other, as well as the uncanny sense that his/her Otherness haunts and makes impossible such an engagement. When viewed in this way, vernacular intercultural relationships, and the fantasies and frustrations surrounding them, emerge as the site where residents of multi-ethnic neighbourhoods in postcolonial Europe engage and struggle with existential and ethical questions of human interconnection and, especially, the effects of the culturalist inflection that these questions have gained.
Abstract: This book offers an ethnographic inquiry into the notion of ‘living together’ [samenleven], investigating its historical emergence and role in ‘culturalist’ and secularist politics in Flanders, as well as how it shapes everyday life in diverse urban neighborhoods. The term culturalism was coined to denote the exclusionary discourses that have emerged in postcolonial Europe positing migrants as cultural ‘strangers’ from which the nation and the perceived original, ‘autochthonous’ population need to be safeguarded. This book reveals how culturalism resulted in a new political project to ‘heal’ an assumed deficit of fellow feeling in multi-ethnic urban neighborhoods and a new political-ethical injunction for denizens to ‘live together’ with their ‘strange’ neighbors.
The book focuses on two Antwerpean neighborhoods - Oud-Borgerhout and the ‘Jewish Neighborhood’ – and follows the neighborhood engagements of white Belgian, Moroccan-Belgian, and Jewish Belgian denizens. Due to the politics of ‘living together’, everyday neighborhood life has become a stage, on which denizens are confronted with ethical and philosophical questions to which secure or comfortable answers are never found: about the nature and ethics of ‘objective’ perception; the diagnostics of strangeness; and the nature of fulfilled subject-hood and ‘true’ sociability. Denizens try to position themselves in relation to these questions through largely internal performative contestations - between so-called ‘old’ and ‘new Belgians’, ‘modern’ and ‘pious Jews’, ‘decent’ and ‘bad Moroccans’. Tracing these negotiations, this book pushes for an understanding of lived culturalism in contemporary Europe that attends to the complexities and ambivalences in, and beyond, the imbrication of the allochthon-autochthon divide in denizens’ (self)understandings.
