January 31, 2013

(JTA) — Norway’s justice minister said her country needs a better system for registering anti-Semitic attacks accurately.

“I want more details about hate crimes committed against Norwegian Jews,” Grete Faremo is quoted as saying in a Jan. 26 article in the newspaper Vartland.

According to the article, Faremo is not prepared to add anti-Semitism to Norway’s three specific hate-crime categories: sexual orientation, race/ethnicity and religion. Anti-Semitism is currently registered under the latter.

In October, a report by a delegation of rapporteurs for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) determined anti-Israel attitudes in Norway may be fuelling anti-Semitism there.

“Obviously, this had an impact on my decision,” Faremo is quoted as saying in reference to the report, which was co-authored by Rabbi Andrew Baker, director of international Jewish affairs for the American Jewish Committee, and three other rapporteurs.

Ervin Kohn, president of the Jewish community of Oslo, said the minister’s statements were unsatisfactory. “It is not good enough to say that the registration should be more detailed,” he said. “We want anti-Semitism to be a separate category.”

Norway’s Police Directorate has in the past objected to this, claiming anti-Semitism is too limited a phenomenon in Norway, a country of a few hundred Jews.

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