U.S. Annual Report: Anti-Semitism in Serbia on the Rise

antisemitism (YouTube screenshot)

The latest U.S. State Department’s annual Report on International Religious Freedom says that Serbia’s Jewish community officials had recorded the rise of anti-Semitism on social media in that country during the pandemic, adding that anti-Semitic literature is still available in certain bookstores.

According to the EU Agency for Fundamental Right’s report published in September 2020, between 2009 and 2019 there had been 20 anti-Semitic incidents in Serbia, 11 of which resulted in criminal charges, the State Department reports.

The heads of the two Islamic communities in Serbia say that the fact that neither has the authority to represent the entire Islamic community in that country in the talks with the government has made it harder to coordinate the property restitution claims and the selection of teachers for religion courses in the country’s primary and secondary schools.

The report published in the evening on May 12 also says that the non-traditional religious groups, mostly Christian Protestant churches, are constantly faced with the public’s distrust and misunderstanding, and that some portals and traditionally-oriented media frequently describe them as “sects”, which in the Serbian language has a strongly negative connotation.