This week, the Anne Frank House has come under fire for preventing a Jewish employee from wearing his kippa for six months. The Anne Frank House, a nonpartisan museum dedicated to preserving the memory and writings of its namesake, denied Barry Vingerling, an Orthdox Jew, from wearing this essential symbol of the Jewish faith as it was worried it would infringe upon their efforts to remain “neutral.” “We wanted first to know if a religious expression would interfere with our independent position,” managing director Garance Reus-Deelder told the Daily Mail. Vingerling was told to remove his kippa when he showed up for his first day of work, and was then informed he would have to put in a special request for permission to wear it while working at the Anne Frank house. The process and debate surrounding Vingerling’s request took the Anne Frank House’s board of directors six months to complete. During the interim period, Vingerling was told he could wear a baseball cap with the museums logo on it as a compromise. The Anne Frank house eventually decided that allowing the skullcap would not constitute a break in its neutrality, and gave Vingerling permission to resume wearing it on the premises. Rules and regulations that put limits on Jewish cultural displays and practices are quickly becoming the norm in Western Europe. Recent attempts to ban Kosher slaughter in Poland, to ban circumcision in Iceland, and now to disallow the wearing of religious garb at a site dedicated to preserving Jewish culture and heritage are all par for the course. This incident is particularly telling of the atmosphere currently taking hold in the Netherlands. A recent study by the Center for Information and Documentation on Israel, an independent Dutch foundation, found that incidents of anti-Semitic vandalism have risen by 40% in the Netherlands since 2016. This is not the first time the Anne Frank house has courted controversy concerning its role in promoting this surge of anti-Semitism. As recently as last week, the Anne Frank Foundation, which oversees the museum, has signed a partnership with an organization that has made grants to groups that support BDS. The Anne Frank House, a museum dedicated to a young Jewish woman murdered simply for being Jewish, has its board of directors debating whether or not Jewish religious garb on their premises would make them appear “partisan,” all the while allocating funds to organizations that demonize the one Jewish state. The rising tide of anti-Semitism in Western Europe, from which the Netherlands is not exempted, is rendering any place of Jewish suffering, whether they be the Anne Frank House or Auschwitz, an ideological battleground where history is being purposefully rewritten and obscured.