Weeks have passed, but his indignation has not subsided. Baruch, 19, is still as stunned when he shows, on his mobile phone, the photo of a sign discovered at the end of February on the front of a winter sports equipment rental store, at the top of the Davos slopes , in Swiss. It is written there in Hebrew: “We no longer rent sleds and skis to our Jewish friends. » For this resident of a haredi (ultraorthodox) neighborhood in Stamford Hill, north London, “this is the sign that the red line has been crossed.” He compares this to “the ambient atmosphere in Germany from 1933”. “And we know the rest”he adds.
The young man has been studying at a Talmudic school in Davos for several months. At the entrance to this former hotel converted into a reception center for young religious people, dozens of hats and black frock coats hang from the hooks in the vestibule. There are around sixty teenagers and young men, black pants and white shirts, kippahs and papillotes, who come from all over Europe and sometimes from a little further afield, to study Talmud in one of the two yeshivas (schools). Talmudic) of the station. Moshe lives in Antwerp (Belgium), Josef in Bnei Brak, near Tel Aviv, David in Amsterdam. They all say the same thing : “Since October 7, 2023 [date de l’attaque du Hamas sur le sol israélien], the climate has changed. The looks become heavy, insistent, as if they wanted to burden us with guilt. »
No more sleds for Jews. What alpine fly could have bitten Ruedi Pfiffner, quiet manager of a small high-altitude business? The man briefly explained it in the German-speaking press, before disappearing from circulation as the affair grew to the point of making headlines in the United States and Israel. “They wear sneakers and are not equipped for winter sports. They sometimes abandon the equipment on the slopeshe clarified. We no longer want to run the risk of a customer causing a serious accident and holding us responsible. » His refusal to rent his equipment would therefore have nothing to do with personal considerations, but rather with security aspects.
“The problem is in the “they”, which is in itself anti-Semitic, by its unacceptable generalization and by the discrimination it implies, retorts Jonathan Kreutner, secretary general of the Swiss Federation of Jewish Communities (FSCI), who is considering legal action. Not all Jews leave sleds in the snow, not all Jews behave badly with shopkeepers. » The cantonal police of Grisons have opened an investigation, which will have to establish the part of the clumsiness or intentionality of the message, quickly withdrawn to be replaced by another, in German, which no longer mentions the Jewish clientele, but specifies that clothes and suitable winter shoes are necessary to rent sports equipment in winter.
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