ENMA, which is funded by the European Commission, consists of Jewish and non-Jewish civil society organisations in Germany, Austria, and Poland and is open to further members.

Since the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7 last year, Europe has witnessed a “tsunami of anti-Semitism,’’in the words of Katharina von Schnurbein, European Commission Coordinator on Combating Antisemitism and  Fostering Jewish Life.

In order to document anti-Semitism across Equrope, a new initiative to record anti-Semitic incidents across Europe was launched in Berlin this week.

The European Network for Monitoring Anti-Semitism (ENMA) aims to provide a transnational overview of the extent of hostility towards Jews.

“Anti-Semitism must be made visible in order to be able to combat it,” said von Schnurbein.

Obtaining an adequate picture of anti-Semitism in society is a prerequisite for informing politicians and decision-makers appropriately, she said.

ENMA, which is funded by the European Commission, consists of Jewish and non-Jewish civil society organisations in Germany, Austria, and Poland and is open to further members. It aims at providing comparable data on antisemitic incidents across Europe by building a user-friendly reporting infrastructure that will serve Jewish communities and affected persons across Europe. It also has as objective to lower the threshold for reporting antisemitic incidents to the police.

According to the EU Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA), anti-Semitic incidents are underreported, with as many as eight out of 10 people who experience anti-Semitism not reporting it. Von Schnurbein said that this was often because seen as too “cumbersome” to do so.

Germany’s anti-Semitism Commissioner Felix Klein explained that all anti-Semitic incidents could be reported in the most direct, quickest and most uncomplicated way. This information would then be collected, verified, analysed and published. The data collected in this way paints a picture that more realistically reflects the reality of anti-Semitism in the countries.

The Managing Director of  RIAS, the Berlin-based Federal Association of Department for Research and Information on Antisemitism, Benjamin Steinitz, spoke of a milestone in anti-Semitism research and prevention. “Anti-Semitism is on the rise in Europe, but too little is known about its transnational dimension,” he said.