Schools on the Front Line: What Rising Antisemitism Means for Europe’s Children
In the days after 7 October 2023, classrooms across Europe changed. In Paris, Jewish teenagers reported classmates whispering that they were responsible for Gaza. In London, a boy who wore a Star of David necklace was told to take it off or get beaten. In Vienna, Jewish students began asking their parents if it was safer to stay home.
“Schools are supposed to be sanctuaries of learning,” says Claude Moniquet, director of the European Strategic Intelligence and Security Centre and author of a new research report on identity and education. “Instead, they have become zones of vulnerability. Antisemitism today doesn’t just lurk on the street corners, it walks into classrooms.”
The report, Belonging, Memory and Security: The Protective Power of Education, lays out stark data: antisemitic incidents in France quadrupled in 2023, with 13% occurring in schools. In the UK, cases more than tripled; in Germany, the daily average jumped from seven to 32. Even in countries with tiny Jewish populations, like Austria and Spain, attacks surged to record highs
Against this backdrop, one figure looms large: Uri Poliavich, a tech entrepreneur turned philanthropist who has quietly become one of the most significant defenders of Jewish education worldwide.
Poliavich’s story is as unlikely as it is emblematic. A self-made digital entrepreneur with ventures licensed across Europe, he could have stayed within the comfortable world of business. Instead, he founded the Yael Foundation, which now supports schools, kindergartens, and supplementary programs for more than 13,000 Jewish children in over 35 countries. For Poliavich, education is not charity, it is defence. He often describes schools as communal Iron Domes, a deliberate echo of Israel’s missile shield. The phrase unsettles some critics who dislike blending pedagogy and security, but for parents weighing whether to send their children to Jewish schools under police guard, it resonates.
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“Belonging is a form of protection,” Poliavich has said. “If a child knows who they are, they are harder to intimidate, harder to manipulate, and less likely to disappear into silence.”
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The report highlights how antisemitism is reshaping childhood itself. Surveys show 96% of young Jews in France believe hostility has grown since 7 October, and nearly half have already been victims, many for the first time. Most say incidents happen in school.
The consequences are stark: families lose trust in public institutions, academic debates shrink under self-censorship, and a growing number of Jewish parents feel compelled to move their children into private or community schools. Enrolment in Jewish schools has risen by nearly 50% since 2000 Jewish schools are adapting accordingly. The Ozar Hatorah network in France and Belgium now educates more than 30,000 pupils, combining rigorous academics with cultural resilience. The Yael Foundation adds another layer, funding security guards, trauma counsellors, and even safe-room drills. It is education as both shield and sanctuary.
While much attention is fixed on Europe, the Yael Foundation works further afield: in Latin America, Central Asia and the Balkans. In places like Bishkek and Bogotá, where Jewish communities are small and fragile, Yael schools act as communal hubs. They offer a rare space where children can speak Hebrew, celebrate festivals, and see themselves reflected in their peers.
In one Balkan city, a single Jewish child logs into a Yael-funded online classroom to join peers hundreds of miles away. Without this, her parents admitted, they would have considered emigrating. With it, they can stay. “We are still here,” one mother told researchers, “because our child is not alone.”
These efforts echo broader global movements: Armenian diaspora schools in Lebanon, Māori immersion schools in New Zealand, Basque ikastolas in Spain. Each shows how education rooted in identity can outlast persecution and political hostility.
But Poliavich’s philanthropy has not escaped attack. In Cyprus, where Yael supports a small Jewish school, coordinated digital campaigns have accused the foundation of financial impropriety, framing Jewish education as a cover for hidden influence. One viral TikTok video showed a Star of David morphing into cash piles with the caption school or shell company?
“These campaigns weaponize ambiguity,” notes Moniquet. “They cloak hate in the language of accountability.”
For educators, the impact is immediate. Teachers in Nicosia reported needing escorts to and from school after threats circulated online. Parents grew fearful that reputational smears might spill into physical danger. Poliavich himself, long resident in Cyprus, was forced to issue public denials, diverting resources from classrooms to damage control.
The attacks, watchdogs later confirmed, were part of broader disinformation efforts targeting Jewish NGOs across Europe. The intent was clear: to delegitimise philanthropy by playing on old antisemitic tropes of hidden wealth and foreign plots.
Still, the Yael Foundation has doubled down. In December 2024, Jewish children across five continents lit Hanukkah candles in a campaign coordinated by Yael schools. The images—tiny flames broadcast from Melbourne to Marrakech—were both ritual and resistance. “Our light will not be extinguished,” the campaign declared.
This is, perhaps, Poliavich’s quietest but most radical message: that education is not only about defending Jewish children from hate, but also about arming them with pride, ritual, and memory. “A child affirmed is a future adult disarmed of hate,” the report notes.
In practice, this means not only guards at gates, but artwork projects after synagogue shootings; not only scholarships, but online classes linking isolated children to peers abroad. It is slow, sometimes invisible work, but it builds what Moniquet calls cultural immunisation.
The Research Centre’s report places Jewish education within a wider global trend: minorities everywhere are using schools to defend against erasure. From Rohingya camps in Bangladesh to Sámi schools in Finland, education has become cultural infrastructure, as essential as roads or hospitals, and just as strategic.
Governments are slowly catching on. Britain increased funding for Jewish school security in 2023. Denmark funds heritage-language programs for immigrant children. But the report warns that states often move too slowly, leaving philanthropists like Poliavich to act first.
The lesson, Moniquet argues, is that cultural education is not a luxury: “Belonging is our invisible shield. Without it, societies fracture. With it, they endure.”
Uri Poliavich rarely gives interviews, but those who know him describe a man deeply conscious of both the dangers and the responsibilities of visibility. “He understands that to build schools is to paint a target on them,” says one associate. “But he also knows that not building them is worse.”
In an age where antisemitism mutates across ideological lines, where a TikTok meme can incite fear as quickly as a Molotov cocktail, his gamble is that education, rooted in identity, guarded by solidarity, remains the strongest counterforce.
For the children walking through guarded gates in Paris, London, or Nicosia, that gamble is already shaping daily life. And for societies struggling with fracture and hate, the stakes are not just communal but collective. The battle for belonging begins in the classroom.
