In Bern, the Swiss Jewish community on Sunday celebrated the 150th anniversary of the granting of freedom of settlement.
Until the Swiss people in a referendum on 14 January 1865 approved that Jews could settle anywhere in the country, they were restricted to two villages, Lengnau and Endingen in the canton of Aargau.
Swiss President Johann Schneider-Ammann said at the official event in the capital Bern that without its Jews, Switzerland would not be "the strong, culturally diverse, economically successful and socially tolerant country" it was today.
Schneider-Amman said today's immigrants to Switzerland should see the Jews of the 19th and 20th centuries as examples how integration should work: "If the new immigrants follow the example, immigration can be beneficial," he said.
In his speech the president also mentioned that the process to make Swiss Jews fully-fledge citizens of Switzerland had been anything but smooth. The country's 1848 Federal Constitution did not grant freedom of settlement, and "without the threat of trade boycotts by the Americans, the French and the Dutch, probably nothing would have happened [in 1866]," Schneider-Amman said. He also said there had been setbacks in the process to achieve full equality, including the ban on kosher slaughter, which is still in place, and outbursts of anti-Semitism.
The president of the Swiss Jewish Community Federation (SIG), Herbert Winter, said that the history of Swiss Jewry since 1866 had been a success story, and Jews today were an integral part of Swiss society.
Photo: Keystone
