Attacker cries ‘cancer Jews’ at Dutch chief rabbi’s son and family

The son of a chief rabbi of the Netherlands and his family were accosted on the street by people he said intimidated the family, shouting at them “cancer Jews.”

Rabbi Yanki Jacobs, the son of Binyomin Jacobs, complained to police on Sunday about the incident, which occurred the previous evening, the AD news website reported.

On a street corner in a heavily Jewish area in southern Amsterdam, “two young men called out at the family: ‘Cancer Jews’ and ‘f**k all Jews’ at our direction. They repeatedly drove in our direction in an intimidating manner,” Yanki Jacobs is quoted as saying.

He also listed on Twitter the license plate number of the vehicle he said the two men were in, with a request to help identify them. The men appeared to be of Middle Eastern descent, he said.

“I have had enough,” he told AD, adding he had been cursed on the street before. “I’ve grown accustomed to thinking about it as normal but now thought that we as a Jewish community must no longer agree for this to happen to us. If I do nothing, who will? I walk around my neighbourhood, a tenth-generation Amsterdam Jew and I will not be driven out of this city.”

The home of Binyomin Jacobs, Yanki Jacobs’ father, has been vandalised five times in recent years. In 2014 police advised Binyomin Jacobs to not use some trains for fear for his safety.

The Dutch Public Prosecution Service this year said that it had recorded 141 confirmed criminal offenses of discrimination against Jews in the Netherlands in 2017. The figure constitutes a near doubling of this category over the previous year and a five-year high. It also means that anti-Semitic offenses accounted in 2017 for 41 percent of all the xenophobic incidents recorded.