You're listening to a podcast from the BBC World Service. This is Hard Talk with me, Stephen Sacker.

Thanks for downloading this edition of the program. I do hope you enjoy it. Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World

Service with me, Stephen Sacker. My guest today is one of the most influential Orthodox Jewish faith leaders in Europe.

Pinchas Goldschmidt is a polyglot whose religious education and service has taken him

from a Swiss childhood through years of study in the United States to rabbinical positions in Israel

and then for the last three decades in Russia. He's been chief rabbi of Moscow since 1993,

and for the past seven years has also been the president of the conference of European rabbis.

And that role has put him at the center of the Jewish community's concern at the rising

levels of anti-Semitism in much of Europe and indeed in the United States as well.

Opinion polls of Jewish citizens suggest growing numbers feel insecure in the democracies of the Western world.

Governments routinely voice concern and pledge action, but is enough being done to reassure and protect Jewish citizens.

It's rising anti-Semitism a symptom of a liberal democratic order that is starting to crumble.

Well, Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt joins me now. Welcome to Hard Talk.

Thank you.

There is a lot of evidence from surveys and opinion polls

across Europe suggesting that Jews feel much more insecure than they did 10, 20 years ago. Why?

The attacks against the Jewish community come from different places.

There is the attack from Islamic radicals, Islamic terrorism, as we have seen it in Toulouse

in Paris, in Copenhagen and Brussels.

And we also have attacks against religious practice of Jewish religious practice in the European

parliaments outlawing practices such as circumcision and preparing kosher meat and also the far left

is with the far right is getting stronger in many places in Europe,

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