History of the Jews in Luxembourg

Judaism is the fifth-largest religious denomination in Luxembourg, behind Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, Orthodox Christianity, and Islam.

By absolute size, Luxembourg's community is one of the smallest in the European Union; relative to total population, it is the sixth largest.

The first record of a Jewish community in Luxembourg was made in 1276,[3] and, over the next fifty years, the population grew as a result of immigration from Trier.

During the Black Death, the Jews were made scapegoats, and were murdered or expelled from the towns of Luxembourg City and Echternach.

After the Napoleonic conquest of the Austrian Netherlands in 1794, Jews were allowed back into Luxembourg, and the community flourished.

[5] From October 1940, the Gestapo adopted a policy of encouraging Jews to emigrate westwards; in the following year, nearly, 1,000 took this opportunity, although it would not be enough to escape the Nazis' persecution.

Over the second half of the twentieth century, Luxembourg's Jewish population gradually shrank, as families emigrated to other countries.

In recent years, a wave of immigration by young Jews, mainly from France, attracted by good working conditions, has compensated somewhat the shrinking of the Jewish population.

Rabbi Serebrenik and his congregation gave their new synagogue the name Ramath Orah (Hebrew for 'mountain of light', i.e. 'Luxembourg'[citation needed]).

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the National Movement, a far-right and openly xenophobic political party, achieved moderate success by the ballot box.

Despite its attraction to neo-Nazis and its opposition to ethnic and religious minorities, most of its rhetoric was aimed at guest workers from southern Europe, and not at the Jewish population.