The EU is not keeping proper track of anti-Semitic crimes and incidents, the bloc’s human rights agency has said on the anniversary of the 1938 Nazi pogroms against Jews.
Of the 28 EU countries, 11 have not provided official information on such incidents for 2016 or have not recorded anti-Semitism at all, the EU Fundamental Rights Agency said in Vienna on Thursday.
“Without such data, efforts to combat anti-Semitism will remain general and untargeted,” the agency said in a statement.
Different data collection methods among EU countries and “large-scale underreporting by victims” also obscured the picture.
Some of the countries that do report hate crimes against Jews need to improve their monitoring, the agency added.
The Fundamental Rights Agency carried out a large-scale survey among nearly 6,000 Jews in the EU in 2012, which showed that more than 26 per cent had been verbally harassed because of their religion in the past year.
Four per cent had experienced physical violence or threats.The survey will be repeated next year.
The EU agency reported that there is no police data at all from Hungary, Lithuania, Malta and Portugal.
The following countries have not provided data for 2016: Finland, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Slovakia and Sweden.
In anti-Semitic riots that started on Nov. 9, 1938, Nazis and their sympathisers killed more than 1,300 Jews and set ablaze 1,400 synagogues across Germany and Austria.
Jewish property was looted on a large scale. The following day, 30,000 male Jews were deported to concentration camps.