Austria to triple its spending on Jewish community security
Federal funding will be at £3.65m which is greater the amount spent by the Vienna Jewish community alone on keeping people safe
Austria’s government has agreed to cover all the security costs of its Jewish community.
The federal funding for security measures will be £3.65m ($4.7 million) annually — more than the £3.34 ($4.3 million) that the Jewish Community in Vienna, the organisation representing local Jews, spends each year on security, the Judische Allgemeine paper in Germany reported Friday.
The funding triples what the government had given previously, according to the report.
“The law enables a consolidation of the religious community, it secures the existence and thus the diverse services of the Jewish Community in Vienna as we currently know it,” that organisation’s president, Oskar Deutsch, wrote in a statement.
Last month Elie Rosen, the leader of the Jewish community of the Austrian city of Graz, was assaulted in what he and officials said was an antisemitic attack by a perpetrator who hates Israel. The incident was widely covered in the media in Austria and beyond.
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