The leader of a European Jewish organization has called on European Parliament President Martin Schulz to convene an “ urgent” session the assembly “in order to discuss how to cut down, as they bud, the hallucinatory anti-Semitic initiatives of French extreme-right leader Marine Le Pen."
In an interview with Le Monde newspaper, Marine Le Pen, leader of the extreme-right National Front party and a member of the European Parliament, called Friday for a ban on wearing Muslim veils and Jewish skullcaps "in stores, on public transport and on the streets."
Asked if the ban should apply to the Jewish kippah or yarmulke, as well as Muslim headwear, she said: "It is obvious that if the veil is banned, the kippah is banned in public as well."
Menachem Margolin, CEO of the Brussels-based European Jewish Association (EJA) has sent a letter to Schulz in which he urged the European Parliament “to speak out loudly and clearly against the hateful and stupid initiative.”
“History has shown that the most terrible events that have occurred over the years were because the public leaders failed to prevent anti-Semitism from developing. 70 years after the Holocaust, the European Parliament must speak out loudly and clearly against the hateful proposal of one of its member who joins a wave of anti-Semitism," he wrote in the letter.
Stressing that European Jewry "stands behind the Jews in France," Margolin called for Jews everywhere in the world to pray on upcoming Yom Kippur “to ask God to annul the intentions and decrees of Marine Le Pen.”