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Photo by AP Photo/Czarek Sokolowski / AP

This year’s commemorations come as a resurgence of anti-Semitism casts a shadow over a new generation of European Jews, something that is driving thousands of them each year to leave the continent.

“We must be honest enough to admit that more than 70 years after the Shoah, anti-Semitism is still alive in our ‘civilized’ European Union,” Federica Mogherini, the European Union’s top foreign affairs representative, said in a statement.

Jewish immigration to Israel from Western Europe grew last year due to a rise in anti-Semitic attacks. Most — nearly 8,000 — were from France, where Islamic extremist attacks have destroyed the sense of security previously felt by Europe’s largest Jewish population.

In Germany, where hundreds of thousands of Muslim refugees have arrived in the past year, Jews feel threatened from both the far right and people coming from countries like Syria.

A rise in anti-Muslim hostility amid the refugee crisis is — irrationally — also fueling anti-Semitism as a growing number of people lash out in fear at anyone they perceive as different.

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On Saturday, neo-Nazis paraded in the centre of the English city of Newcastle doing Nazi salutes and carrying a banner that said: “Refugees Not Welcome. Hitler Was Right.”

And late last year in Poland, far-right extremists at an anti-migrant demonstration in Wroclaw burned the effigy of an Orthodox Jew.

At a ceremony Wednesday morning at the United Nations, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon spoke out against a “rising tide of anti-Semitism, anti-Muslim bigotry and other forms of discrimination” around the world, and he used the occasion to once again call for all parties in Syria’s conflict to allow the unimpeded delivery of aid to millions.