Brussels – The mother of a 14 year old student, attending first year in Athénée
Adolphe Max in Brussels, has filed a complaint on Friday for antisemitism,
announced Joël Rubinfeld, president of the Belgian Association against
Antisemitism.
The young boy refuses to return to class due to fear of further attacks
and harassment. The French speaking student carries the Jewish name of his
mother’s former husband, who has passed away. At the beginning of November, he
explains that he was identified as “the Jew” and that he was physically
threatened and insulted repeatedly as “dirty Jew”, “dirty Flemish” and other
verbal insults with reference to Hitler. The student has therefore stopped
attending any classes since May 5.
The school called up his mother to notify her about the student’s
absence. She then filed a case at the police against one of the students in the
same school, aged 15 or 16. He is accused of harrasement, stealing her son’s
smartphone and stealing money and jewelry from the son’s grandmother. As the
young boy returned to school, he was physically threatened. His mother met with
the school direction this week and decided to withdraw her child completely
from the school.
“We have seen similar cases in
other Brussels schools such as Athénée Emile Bockstael or at Jacqmain, and also
in those cases it was the student who was the victim of antisemitic acts that had
to leave the school”, notes Joël Rubinfeld. “The students who commit these
acts are usually not punished in anyway and are left alone. Consequently, more
and more parents who originally didn’t want their children to live in ‘closed
environments’, choose to place their children in Jewish schools afterall.”
