STOCKHOLM – On the afternoon of Oct. 7, 2023, while Israel was still fighting Hamas terrorists who had crossed the Gaza border and the scale of the massacre was only beginning to emerge, Lena Posner-Korosi, former president of the Jewish Central Council of Sweden, began receiving anxious phone calls from members of the Jewish community.
“Have you seen what your imam is saying?” they asked.
The imam in question was Salahuddin Barakat of the Islamic Academy in Malmo, Sweden’s southern gateway city. Malmo prides itself on its diversity. Of its 368,000 residents, roughly a third come from 187 countries. Around half of those with a foreign background are Muslim.
Malmo’s small Jewish community, today numbering around 800 people, has been under enormous pressure for years. Over the past few decades, Jewish residents have faced repeated harassment, threats, and attacks, many attributed to radicalized elements within the city’s Muslim population. Over time, the pressure drove nearly a third of the community to leave.
In an effort to reduce these tensions, Posner-Korosi helped establish a Jewish-Muslim dialogue initiative in 2017 called Amanah. The project brought together Malmo’s rabbi, Moshe David Hacohen, and Imam Barakat.
“For seven years they went to school together,” Posner-Korosi says. “They spoke about Judaism and Islam, about antisemitism and Islamophobia. The rabbi was a settler from Tekoa. The imam was born in Lebanon and came to Sweden as a small child. They became very good friends.”
The project deliberately avoided political arguments over the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
“We agreed that we would not agree about the Middle East,” she says. “But we had so many other things in common.”
That fragile understanding collapsed on Oct. 7.
Curious and uneasy, Posner-Korosi read Barakat’s social media post. It seemed to express solidarity with Palestinians and support for the massacre, framing their attacks as resistance against decades of “occupation,” describing the bloodshed in terms of liberation.
“I called him and asked directly what made him write that after all the years we had worked together,” she recounts. “I asked him if he had been lying to us all along.”
His reply was simple.
“You know,” he told her, “people are accusing me of being a collaborator with Israel and the Zionists.”
Posner-Korosi was taken aback by the obfuscation but did not hesitate.
“I asked him if he thought I had not been accused in my own community of working with the Muslim Brotherhood. Either you believe in what you are doing, or you do not. Either you are a coward, or this is what you really think. In either case, I told him that for me, he was no longer a leader, and our cooperation ended there.”
Seven years of hopeful dialogue and engagement ended in a single conversation.
FOR MANY members of Sweden’s Jewish community, the largest in Scandinavia, which numbers almost 20,000 people, the collapse of that partnership symbolized something larger. The weeks after the Oct. 7 massacre by Hamas saw a wave of hostility directed at Jews that seemed to come from many directions at once.
“In Sweden, like in many European countries, everything has changed since Oct. 7,” says Posner-Korosi. Her father escaped Nazi Germany on a Kindertransport from Berlin, while her mother’s family fled pogroms in Russia.
“For decades, we were told that antisemitism came mainly from the extreme Right, from neo-Nazis and skinheads,” she explains. “What became extremely clear after Oct. 7 was how loud anti-Zionism on the political Left and in cultural circles had become.”
Many activists insist they oppose Israel, not Jews. Yet to Jewish ears, the distinction often rings hollow.
“We know this language from our history,” Posner-Korosi says.
At the same time, tensions have grown between segments of Sweden’s Muslim population, which is itself far from homogeneous.
“On Oct. 7, all the Muslim communities we had worked with in southern Sweden went silent,” she recalls.
The nature of antisemitism, she believes, has also changed.
“Before, you would see graffiti or swastikas,” she says. “Now, gravestones are broken. People receive threats online. Jewish children are questioned in school simply because they are Jewish. In workplaces, people ask Jews about their views on Israel in a way that never happened before.”
The psychological toll is widespread.
“More Jews are afraid today,” she says. “It affects everyone, but when it affects our children in schools and universities, it hurts the most.”
ONE EPISODE still fills her with anger. The parents of a Jewish girl in her final year at a respected public high school in Stockholm contacted Posner-Korosi after their daughter faced harassment from classmates. The school’s website regularly published notices about upcoming pro-Palestinian demonstrations.
A meeting was arranged with the principal and two teachers. One of them, Posner-Korosi says, was also a political activist.
During preparations for International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the Jewish student said that one teacher had told her to give a speech about a “current genocide.”
When she raised the issue in the meeting, the teacher dismissed it as a misunderstanding.
“The student insisted that this was exactly what the teacher had said,” Posner-Korosi recounts. “She told us she had tried several times to discuss it with him, but he refused to listen.”
When the situation failed to improve, Posner-Korosi confronted the principal.
“I told him that if he treats one minority in such a political way, how can other minorities ever feel safe to complain? ‘What kind of school are you running?’”
SIMILAR CONCERNS have emerged in Swedish universities. In response, the Swedish Union of Jewish Youth conducted a survey among Jewish students and university employees following Oct. 7.
The findings were alarming. The report, “We Are Not Welcome Here,” revealed a sharp decline in Jewish students’ sense of safety on campus.
Some 90% of the respondents to the survey believed that the sense of safety at universities has deteriorated since Oct. 7; 50% have experienced or witnessed antisemitic incidents at their educational institution; 50% said they considered not going to the campus; 90% said that their university is not taking sufficient action to combat antisemitism, and 70% have low or very low confidence that societal institutions would help them if they were exposed to antisemitism.
Daniel Janouch, the 27-year-old chairman of the organization, says antisemitism was already part of his own childhood experience.
“I did not grow up in a Jewish bubble,” he explains. “But I always identified strongly with my Jewish identity, even though I was not particularly religious.”
Throughout elementary school, he encountered antisemitic insults, Holocaust jokes, and swastikas drawn on desks.
“At that age, many children treat it as a taboo to experiment with,” he says. “It was unpleasant, but it was not physical violence.”
Where he grew up, he adds, there were almost no Muslims. “It was a quiet Stockholm suburb,” he says. “Most people were Swedish for generations.”
However, since Oct. 7, the nature of antisemitism has evolved.
“Today, the language has changed,” Janouch says. “People know it is unacceptable to praise Hitler or draw swastikas. Instead, they use slogans like ‘From the river to the sea’ or talk about ‘Zionists controlling the media or banks.’”
In many cases, the old conspiracy theories remain intact, but rebranded.
“Everything that used to be said about Jews is now said about Zionists,” he says. “People tell themselves that it is just criticism of Israel, but the stereotypes are exactly the same.”
Official statistics suggest a dramatic rise in antisemitic incidents. Swedish police recorded a record 312 crimes with antisemitic motives in 2024, more than double the number recorded two years earlier.
YET, PARADOXICALLY, international surveys continue to rank Sweden as one of the least antisemitic countries in the world. According to the ADL Global Index, only a small minority of Swedes express openly antisemitic attitudes.
Jan Christer Mattsson, director of the Segerstedt Institute at the University of Gothenburg, believes the discrepancy reveals a deeper problem in how antisemitism is measured.
“The Israel-Palestinian conflict is not the root cause of antisemitism,” he says. “What it does is activate antisemitism that already exists.”
Antisemitism, he argues, functions as a ready-made explanation for complex events.
“As Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, if the Jew did not exist, the antisemite would invent him.”
Mattsson’s research has revealed another phenomenon he calls the “antisemitic paradox.” In modern Western societies, overt antisemitism is socially unacceptable. As a result of that stigma, many people hesitate to identify antisemitic behavior unless it is blatant or violent.
“In other contexts, we recognize concepts such as microaggressions or minority stress,” he explains. “But when Jews describe subtle hostility, their experiences are often dismissed.”
“We did research in which we changed the term ‘Jew’ to ‘Zionist,’ and we proved that we are measuring contemporary antisemitism in the wrong way,” Mattsson said. “By asking about Jews, we are measuring modern antisemitism, the sort of antisemitism that ultimately led to the Holocaust.
“Contemporary antisemitism contains the features of traditional antisemitism but with a different labeling. Everyone needs to know that the level of antisemitism has been underestimated.
“When tensions rise in the Middle East, the reactions we see should be understood against a broader reality: Antisemitism is more widespread than previously acknowledged.”
Mattsson describes the current climate as a “perfect storm” created by three overlapping forces.
The first is the lingering legacy of Christian anti-Judaism, deeply embedded in European cultural memory. The second is modern anti-Zionist discourse, which often functions as a coded form of hostility toward Jews. The third is the influence of attitudes imported from parts of the Middle East where antisemitic narratives remain widespread.
“These elements reinforce each other,” he says. “And they are not confined to the political fringes. Our research found very little difference between Left-leaning and Right-leaning respondents when it came to hostility toward Zionism.”
IN OTHER words, the problem has become mainstream.
“We have been witnessing severe challenges for Jews in parts of Sweden for many years, particularly in Malmo, which has become a sort of barometer for how bad antisemitism can become,” says Moshe Kantor, president of the European Jewish Congress, the democratically elected organization representing European Jewry.
“What we are currently seeing in Sweden reflects a broader European trend. When anti-Zionism is excused, antisemitism flourishes, and Jews become targets. We have already witnessed how this has led to deadly attacks on Jewish schools, synagogues, and at Jewish events around the world.
“Governments across Europe must recognize that attacks on the sole Jewish state often serve as a gateway for hostility and violence toward Jewish communities at home. The recent wave of attacks demonstrates that this is no longer theoretical, and Jewish blood is being shed because of it.”
Swedish writer and comedian Aron Flam has long challenged what he sees as Sweden’s reluctance to confront uncomfortable historical truths. His 2019 bestseller This Is a Swedish Tiger examined Sweden’s wartime neutrality and its economic cooperation with Nazi Germany.
The title refers to a famous wartime poster encouraging citizens to remain silent to avoid aiding enemy spies.
Flam’s book provoked controversy. Police raided his publisher’s offices, confiscated copies, and attempted to prosecute him over alleged copyright violations involving the poster. After a lengthy legal battle, he was acquitted.
For Flam, the episode reflected a broader cultural reluctance to question national myths.
“Antisemitism in Sweden has long been a taboo subject,” he says. “For many years, Swedes preferred to see their country as a humanitarian and moral superpower.”
In his view, antisemitism in Sweden today stems partly from political ideology.
“The political Left has dominated Sweden for decades,” he contends. “It has also been extremely supportive of Palestinian causes and often hostile toward Israel.”
At the same time, immigration from regions where antisemitism is widespread has introduced new tensions.
“These two forces interact,” Flam says.
SWEDEN’S CURRENT center-right government, which took office in 2022 with parliamentary support from the nationalist Sweden Democrats, has taken several steps to address antisemitism. It established a government task force dedicated to strengthening Jewish life, and adopted a national strategy to combat antisemitism covering the period from 2025 to 2034.
The government also played a prominent role in nationwide events marking 250 years of Jewish life in Sweden.
For many in the Jewish community, these initiatives have provided reassurance.
“The general feeling among Jews in Sweden today is that this government has done a great deal for us,” Posner-Korosi says.
However, she believes that political support alone cannot resolve the deeper social tensions that have emerged since Oct. 7.
“In the streets, in schools, in workplaces, and cultural institutions, we see a pro-Palestinian movement that quickly turns into hostility toward Israel and toward Jews,” she says.
She has also grown impatient with debates about terminology.
“I stopped speaking about antisemitism,” she says. “I call it what it is: Jew-hatred.”
Despite the challenges, she remains grateful for the government’s support during a difficult period.
“Last year we celebrated 250 years of Jewish life in Sweden,” she notes. “Across the country, people learned about the contributions Jews have made to Swedish society. The government supported that effort and helped fund security and cultural programs.”
Looking ahead, however, uncertainty remains.
With another national election approaching, the political future is unclear. Some fear that a change in government could weaken the current efforts to combat antisemitism.
For Sweden’s Jews, the question is no longer simply about politics or policy.
It is about whether the country they have called home for generations can continue to offer a secure future.