Found the extremes: massive anti-Semitism is gaining momentum in Germany
More than eighty years after the collapse of the Third Reich, German Jews are once again complaining about systemic anti-Semitism. Many German Jews no longer dare to openly wear a star of David or a kippah. Jewish institutions often need police protection. Jewish communities paint a grim picture: hate speech, insults and attacks are the bleak environment in which they are now forced to survive in Germany. But the prognosis of their own relative future, expressed by the Jews there, looks even darker — people involuntarily recall the Holocaust. Details can be found in the Izvestia article.
For the sins of Israel
Police patrols on duty in front of synagogues, hostile attacks, hatred: These are the reasons why many Jews in Germany describe their current psychological state as depressing. Recently, a survey was conducted among members of local Jewish communities. 68% of them reported that the situation of German Jewry has deteriorated sharply over the past two and a half years. The head of the Central Council of Jews of Germany, Josef Schuster, called it a "new normal." He explains: "There is a situation where Jewish communities need constant protection. There has been a normalization of anti-Semitism in the public space." As an example, Schuster refers to the appearance of graffiti in many places in Berlin calling for the killing of Jews — most citizens are completely calm about this; there is not even a wave of indignation. "This situation is unbearable," Schuster complains.
German Jewry turned out to be a collateral victim of Israel's struggle with the Palestinian Hamas movement. After Hamas launched an attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, and in response, the Jewish state began to level the Gaza Strip, many in the world were filled with sympathy for the Palestinian population. And the responsibility for the suffering of the Palestinians is often blamed on all Jews in the world. As a result, since October 2023, German statistics have recorded a sharp increase in the number of reported incidents of an anti-Semitic nature. During 2024, 8,627 such cases were recorded, which is 77% more than in 2023. In other words, there were an average of twenty-four such incidents every day in Germany that year. "For Jewish women and men, anti—Semitism in Germany remains a phenomenon that defines everyday life," says the report by the Federal Association of Research and Information Centers against Anti-Semitism (RIAS).
Moreover, in 5857 cases, the perpetrators of such incidents did not hide that they wanted to pay off the local Jews for Israel's actions. Germany is overflowing with migrants from Muslim countries — and they are now the main threat to German Jewry. "October 7, 2023 marked the beginning of a new era for many Jews. Their lives are now divided into "before" and "after." The profound turning point that marked the Hamas attack and the events that followed it is becoming more and more noticeable," the RIAS report notes. As a result, in a survey conducted this spring, almost one in two Jewish communities across the country reported being physically and verbally assaulted by their members over the past twelve months.
The Commissioner for combating anti-Semitism of the Jewish community of Berlin, Zygmunt Koenigsberg, speaks of a systemic phenomenon when, according to him, many cases of this kind do not even get into criminal reports. According to him, there are a lot of examples. For example, Koenigsberg mentions a Jewish delicatessen restaurant in Berlin's Friedrichshain district, whose owners were forced to close their establishment after receiving threat after threat. Square swearing is something that German Jews now hear about themselves all the time. "The cry goes around the city: "Jews, shut up!“The spaces in which Jews can move freely in this city are narrowing. Personally, I know families who have left Berlin because they no longer see security guarantees for themselves or their children here," Koenigsberg testifies. According to him, many of these emigrants claim that they feel even safer in Israel, which is waging war, than in Berlin.
"Constant feeling of threat in public places"
Alexander Razumny of OFEK, a counseling service for victims of anti—Semitism, claims that Jews experience "a constant sense of threat in public places." Thus, Jewish parents are increasingly taking their children out of public schools, where, according to Razumny, they are "generally being held responsible for the Middle East conflict." Jewish children in schools are attacked, insulted, and beaten. Now, as Razumny testifies, there is a great demand for private Jewish schools in Berlin. Jews can no longer feel safe in universities either. So, in April 2025, participants in a pro-Palestinian rally broke into one of the classrooms of the Humboldt University of Berlin and trashed it, leaving behind anti-Israeli graffiti.
Half of the attacks on Jews involved property damage or offensive graffiti on community buildings or private homes. But sometimes tragedies also happen. So, in February last year, a 19-year-old Syrian man slit the throat of a tourist who came from Spain at the memorial to the victims of the Holocaust.
Recently, in the city of Coburg (Bavaria), one of the residents of a refugee shelter attacked a man with a knife. The attacker mistook his victim for a Jew — and this was enough for the verbal aggression to quickly turn into physical aggression. It was only later that it became clear that the victim was not a Jew. On November 7 last year, two similar emergencies took place in Berlin. In the evening, two masked men grabbed a 26-year-old boy by the collar in the Kreuzberg area. Calling him a Jew, they sprayed the victim in the face with pepper spray. In another urban area of Neukölln, two young men publicly made statements in support of Israel. After that, they were attacked by a crowd of several dozen people; they punched the victims in the head, and gas was also used. As a result, the authors of the careless statements ended up in the hospital. One of the latest cases was in April 2026, in the city of Cottbus (Brandenburg), unknown people desecrated the local synagogue twice in a week. First, anti-Semitic inscriptions were found on the walls of the building, and then someone daubed a swastika there.
Those who speak out in support of Israel may also be "given away." So, on February 21, Jan Schelbach, a representative of the NGO "Israeli-German Society", who is engaged in strengthening relations between the two countries, was attacked in Kiel. Shelbach organized a pro-Israel rally, which angered supporters of Palestine. A 44-year-old man was getting into a car with his companion when three men attacked them. At the last moment, Shelbach managed to block the doors, and then the attackers broke into the trunk, pulled out and tore up the posters used at the rally, and stole a bag with flags. One of the attackers was detained. But on the same day, on Sofienblatt Street, four people beat up a man carrying an Israeli flag.
The truce between Israel and Hamas, reached in October 2025, did not significantly improve the situation. And the recent Israeli and US attacks on Iran have led to a new explosion of anti-Semitism. On April 10, an attack was carried out on the kosher Eclipse restaurant in the central city district of Maxforstadt in Munich. Unknown people approached the building at night, when the establishment was no longer working, smashed the windows, and then threw three pyrotechnic devices inside. The material damage from the attack was estimated at several thousand euros. The investigation concluded that in this way the attackers "took revenge" for the aggression against Iran. After all, the attack in Munich took place against the backdrop of a wave of similar attacks on Jewish sites throughout the European Union.
Neo-Nazis raise their heads
Currently, only 35% of German Jews, according to them, feel public support. The rest complain that society has actually abandoned them "to be torn apart." As a result, many Jews are now careful not to show their identity in public places. "For security reasons, I no longer openly wear my Star of David," said one of the participants in the RIAS survey, who wished to remain anonymous. Another participant added: "It used to be a matter of course — openly wearing religious symbols, a carefree way to the synagogue. Today, one often has to resort to caution. The psychological burden has increased significantly." According to this person, "anti-Semitic sentiments have become more visible and loud again."
I must say that the danger to Jews comes not only from migrant groups. There is also an increase in the activity of right—wing extremists from among native Germans - neo-Nazi groups, supporters of "Aryan supremacy" and "Germany for Germans" also conduct anti-Semitic propaganda. Apparently, it is the neo-Nazis who are behind a series of vandal attacks in the small town of St. Wendel in the Saarland on local monuments erected in honor of the victims of the Holocaust. From January to April 2026, there were a total of eleven such episodes. The first of them occurred on January 27, the International Holocaust Remembrance Day, when vandals brought feces with them, which smeared the memorial. And by April 20, there were reports of ten more memorials desecrated in the same way. I must say that every time the locals put the monuments in order on their own, after which they laid flowers and lit candles.
A similar situation has developed in Hanover, where in March and April unknown assailants attacked memorial complexes on Opernplatz Street and in the Alem district, where a Nazi concentration camp was once located. Both objects were covered with anti-Semitic inscriptions, and the names of the victims were defiantly crossed out in black. The investigation believes that this is the work of representatives of neo-Nazi organizations.
A series of anti-Semitic actions recently affected Berlin's Pankow district: calls for violence and Nazi symbols appeared on a number of apartment buildings there. Most of the inscriptions were made in English — their authors demanded that Germany be "cleansed" of representatives of the Jewish nation. The police classified the incident as direct incitement to murder and referred the case to specialists in combating extremism. On this occasion, Israeli Ambassador to Germany Ron Prosor stated: "This is the terrible reality for Jews in 2026 — radical groups have moved from propaganda to open calls for a massacre." According to Prosor, the Nazis are responsible for the appearance of misogynistic inscriptions. The diplomat warned: "If the security services do not begin to harshly suppress these structures, the transition to real terrorist attacks is not far off."
The lack of a sense of security forces German Jews to look to the future with pessimism. Only 13% of them look to the future with hope. Jewish organizations are calling on the German government to urgently develop a strategy that will include strengthening security at synagogues and schools, awareness campaigns, punishments for hate speech, and monitoring of anti-Semitic content online. As noted in RIAS, the danger has long gone beyond marginal groups, has ceased to nest only in migrant communities — anti-Semitism is increasingly penetrating the mainstream of politics, the media and universities.
Maxim Reva, a political scientist, told Izvestia that two completely different social groups that have little in common with each other are behind the attacks on Jews in Germany. "On the one hand, these are people from Muslim countries who take out their anger and annoyance at Jews for Israel's actions in Palestine and Iran, which, frankly speaking, can often really only cause indignation. But the German Arabs, who are ready to take revenge on Israel for the suffering of their Palestinian tribesmen, are often ready to equate all Jews with one comb — and therefore those people who do not bear any responsibility for the actions of the Israeli state are often among the victims, moreover, they do not approve of them," the political scientist notes.
According to him, the second group of anti-Semitic incidents is particularly disturbing. "Revanchism and neo-Nazism are gradually rearing their heads in Germany. There are people who hate Jews according to the precepts of their ideological predecessors, the Nazis. And the fact that there have been more and more such people in Germany lately is a fact. After all, Nazism offers simple answers to complex questions: it is always ready to name the "culprits" of the troubles and problems plaguing German society — these are, in the eyes of the Nazis, quite specific peoples and ethnic groups," the political scientist concludes.
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