In Brussels, once vibrant shuls are dying or sold

BRUSSELS — Growing up, Joel Rubinfeld went with his parents to their downtown shul.

The sermons were OK, he said, but the real clincher was the full-size ping-pong table at the Sephardic Synagogue on Pavillion Street.

“Placing that table was a stroke of genius,” Rubinfeld, 50, smiled. “Children and teenagers would play for hours as others scampered around the building’s spacious yard.”

Three decades on, the former synagogue stands deserted in one of the Belgian capital’s seediest areas. This area, once the beating heart of a Jewish community of about 20,000, has seen the shuttering and sale of two of its four synagogues, as well as the closure of the Maimonides School, once Belgian Jewry’s flagship institution.

With rising anti-Semitism, a government crackdown on religious freedoms, and growing emigration by Belgian Jews, the decline seems ominous. But there is also evidence that the community is moving to the city’s more affluent south, adapting to urban demographic changes.

“Of course it saddens me when an institution that was one of our community’s most important assets closes down and dies out of security concern,” Yohan Benizri, the president of Belgium’s CCOJB federation of French-speaking Jewish communities, said about Maimonides’ closure.

The sale of two downtown synagogues reflects “more than anything the fact that Jews in Belgium and throughout Western Europe are less interested in going to shul,” he said.

But at the same time, Brussels’ two remaining Jewish schools, in the capital’s south, “have never had higher attendance,” Benizri said. At least three new synagogues have opened there.

The change began in the 1970s with the arrival of Arab and African immigrants who settled in the affordable downtown neighborhoods where Jews of Eastern European descent had lived. By the mid-1980s, many Jews left for more affluent neighborhoods. Their major cultural institutions remained into the 1990s, but the area became a hub for criminal and extremist activity.

Many Jews left not to get away from their Muslim neighbors, but because they could afford a richer neighborhood, said Daniel Rozenberg, president of the Stalingrad Synagogue, one of two shuls still in downtown Brussels. The synagogue — a cavernous space rich with wood furniture — can barely rely on a minyan, a quorum of 10 Jewish men required for public prayer in Orthodox Judaism.

Stalingrad Synagogue, the capital’s second-oldest Jewish house of worship, “is dying,” said Rozenberg. “In truth, it’s been dying since before I became its president in 2002.”

Not far from Stalingrad, the larger Clinique Synagogue faces similar challenges. An imposing corner building with a capacity of more than 500, it stands mostly empty.

Rubinfeld’s father, a Holocaust survivor who opened a bag factory downtown, celebrated his bar mitzvah at Clinique many years ago.

“I can’t say I feel too safe here,” Rubinfeld said outside Clinique, which in 2014 survived an attempted arson attack. “Two able-bodied men may not mind being eyeballed,” he said. “But consider the elderly Jew. Would you come to pray here if you were him?”

The Sephardic Synagogue and nearby Rogier Street Synagogue were sold in 2016. Perhaps fearing vandalism, the new owners of the Sephardic removed the Star of David from its facade, even though it was registered for preservation.

Amid attacks like the attempted arson at Clinique and the murder of four people at the Jewish Museum of Belgium that year, Belgian immigration to Israel increased to what was termed “a silent exodus” by Rubinfeld, who heads the Belgian League Against Anti-Semitism.

From 2010 to 2018, an average of 205 Belgian Jews made aliyah annually — a 54 percent increase over the annual average of 133 in 2005 to 2009, according to Israeli government data. Generally wealthier and more polyglot than their French counterparts, more Belgian Jews have left for English-speaking countries.

In 2015, the chief rabbi of Brussels, Avraham Guigui, made headlines when he said after a wave of terrorist attacks that “people understand there is no future for Jews in Europe.” In addition to immigration to Israel, “there is immigration by Jews to Canada and America. Recession is driving the young people to leave Belgium,” the rabbi said.

Rubinfeld concurs.

“You see the absence of people, former schoolmates who now live in Florida, Melbourne, London,” he said.

The passing last year of laws forbidding kosher slaughter in two of Belgium’s three states — though not Brussels — has dealt another blow to the kingdom’s Jewish minority. Designed to limit the larger halal industry, the bans are hurting the production of kosher meat.

Even in the relatively secular community of Brussels, the bans are “worrying because once one religious freedom is targeted, then there is the possibility of others following suit, like brit milah,” Benizri said. He said he would feel “less comfortable living in Belgium” unless legal efforts to reverse the bans are successful.

Still, Benizri does not feel that his community is in decline — Brussels has about a dozen synagogues, two schools and a radio station.

“The focus of Jewish life has shifted from the synagogue to cultural activities. We still have a strong sense of Jewish identity,” he said. “Declining communities tend to be graying, with few young members. And I don’t think this our situation.”

Benizri cited the annual Lag b’Omer sports event in southern Brussels attended by hundreds of Jews from Belgium’s five large Jewish youth movements.

Asked about the viability of his community’s future, he said, “No one has a crystal ball.”

“There will always be a Jewish presence in Brussels,” he said. “Instead of making predictions about the future, I just try to serve them as best I can.”