Following a near doubling in antisemitic crimes in Sweden, police in Stockholm moved a weekly anti-Israel rally to a Holocaust memorial monument bordering the city’s main synagogue, despite protests by the local Jewish community, its leader told JNS on Monday.

On Saturday, “the rally was moved to the Raoul Wallenberg memorial, which is really offensive,” the president of the Council of Swedish Jewish Communities, Aron Verständig, told JNS. The new location, situated 50 yards from the Great Synagogue of Stockholm, makes “people feel threatened,” Verständig added.

Last month, a report by the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention (Brå) counted 217 reported antisemitic hate crimes in 2024—a 95% increase over the previous report’s tally. Anti-Jewish crimes were the most prevalent of any crimes targeting a religious minority.

Wallenberg was a Swedish diplomat who rescued thousands of Hungarian Jews from the Holocaust and then disappeared after the Red Army took over Hungary.

The anti-Israel protests have been held for the past two years at Odenplan Square, situated more than a mile away from the synagogue, and Sergels Torg Square, located about half a mile from the synagogue.

Police designated the change of venue for the anti-Israel protests, according to Verständig. “The only explanation we got is that the place where the pro-Palestinian events usually happened, the Iranians have taken that place and they need the space,” he told JNS, referring to protesters against the Iranian regime’s brutal crackdown on internal dissent.

In its reply to a JNS query, the Stockholm police did not specify its reasons for switching the venue, saying only that “the goal is to facilitate and create the conditions for meetings to be held and for everyone to feel safe.” A spokesperson added: “Any disruptions to order at previous meetings caused by counter-protesters are not the fault of the organizer and do not affect the assessment in most cases.”

Separately, in Gothenburg, south of Stockholm, protesters were filmed on Saturday chanting “Zios out” at the entrance to the city’s main university. Police were present at the rally, which was not authorized, but did not intervene, Swedish media reported.

The Bråreport showed that the sharp rise in antisemitic hate crimes occurred amid a milder increase in hate crimes against religious minorities, from 451 in 2022 to 504 in 2024 (an 11% bump). Brå publishes its hate crime reports every other year. The report for 2024 was published on Jan. 26, 2025.

In that report, antisemitic crimes accounted for 43% of all reported incidents deemed to have been a hate crime targeting a religious minority. Crimes against Muslims dropped both in absolute numbers and in their share of the total: From 234 in 2022 (52% of the total) to 199 incidents in 2024 (39%).

Estimates of the number of Muslims in Sweden vary from 2% of the population to roughly 8% (200,000-800,000). Sweden has about 15,000 Jews, according to the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, constituting about 0.15% of the population.

The Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and the ensuing war prompted an increase in antisemitic incidents worldwide, and Sweden was no exception, according to Verständig.

The level of antisemitic hate crimes against individuals have decreased since then, he said, “but we’re still seeing an elevated level compared to the period before 2023, and the level of hate crimes and the threats against Jewish institutions, I would say, is the same,” he added.

Last year, Swedish police arrested three men near the Israeli embassy in Stockholm on suspicion of planning an attack. The arrests were made close to the embassy, but not inside the compound itself, spokesperson Susanna Rinaldo told Reuters at the time.

In October, Jewish community activists in Malmo, in southern Sweden, said they had to cancel a Jewish film festival because all of the city’s movie theaters declined to host the event, some citing security reasons.

Last week, the Swedish state’s Review Board for Radio and TV, a government-certified overseer of media fairness, criticized the coverage of this affair by the public broadcaster SVT. The broadcaster falsely stated that all of the venues cited security reasons in declining to host the festival, when in fact some gave different reasons, the review board said, according to a report by the Journalisten website.  

Additionally, one venue, the Hypnos cinema, agreed to host but was deemed too small by the organizers, the review board said. The review followed a complaint by an unnamed party, arguing that SVT’s coverage “risked fueling polarization and the image of anti-Semitism in Malmö.”

SVT stood by its original reporting, insisting that it neither said that all venues declined for security reasons nor that their real motivation for declining was antisemitic, Journalisten reported.

One of the festival’s organizers, Ola Tedin, told JNS: “No regular cinema wanted to let us use their premises. Reasons varied. One cited security concerns. The venue we found eventually (a theater, not a cinema) was not allowed to rent to us by the owner for the same reason. That’s what happened.”

The media review board, Tedin said, “seems to be splitting hairs.”

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