SUE REID: A firebombed Berlin synagogue was a return to darker times
SUE REID: Never again, the world said. But this week a synagogue in Berlin was firebombed and the Star of David daubed on Jewish homes
This week, the mob came for Germany’s Jews. Wearing masks, they crept on foot through the deserted streets at dawn to hurl Molotov cocktails at a Berlin synagogue and daub the Star of David on the front door of a family who worship there.
On Thursday night, standing outside the synagogue where he is chairman, Pasha Lyubarsky asked me sadly: ‘How could this happen in Germany after the Holocaust?’
Two police officers now stand guard 24 hours a day beside the barricaded building, which also houses a school and kindergarten. Of course, the attack had appalling echoes of when Germany’s Jews were systematically persecuted in the run-up to, and then during, World War II.
On one infamous night in 1938, a year before war began, Hitler’s henchmen launched a ferocious assault on Germany’s Jews in Berlin and other cities. Synagogues were set on fire and the windows of Jewish homes and shops were smashed. Many had been daubed with the Star of David beforehand to mark them out for attack.
In the week after ‘Kristallnacht’ (Night of Broken Glass), 30,000 Jewish men were sent to concentration camps.
A Star of David was sprayed outside a building in the Prenzlauberg neighborhood in Berlin earlier this month
A Jewish-run shop in Berlin daubed with graffiti during the June 1938 antisemitic campaign
But in Berlin this week, it was not a Nazi mob tormenting the few remaining Jews who live here — just 9,000 in a city of 3.7 million. Instead, supporters and apologists for Hamas are suspected of perpetrating the attack — including daubing the Star of David on 15 Jewish homes and buildings within a mile of the synagogue.
A few hours after the Molotov cocktails were thrown, a man with his face covered rode up to the building on an e-scooter and tried to run inside. The janitor chased him off.
In a playground not far from the synagogue a Jewish mother had been looking after her two-year-old child when she briefly left her bag behind on a bench.
When she returned to collect it, the ground next to where she had been sitting had been daubed with the Star of David.
As fear has grown, protests took place in Berlin this week demanding the annihilation of Israel.
Pro-Palestinian agitators from the Left were joined by sympathetic first, second, and maybe third-generation, migrants (some perhaps welcomed to Germany in 2015 during the Syrian civil war from Muslim countries).
Protesters pelted police with stones, bottles and firebombs. They set alight barricades and cars, while chanting anti-Jewish slogans. Street battles lasted from Wednesday afternoon until 2am the next day in Berlin’s multicultural suburb of Neukolln, where 1,000 ’emotional’ people fought with police. Some were waving pro-Palestinian flags and wearing hoodies and distinctive black and white scarfs.
An Israeli flag was pulled down from a building. Star of David graffiti was found nearby. Officers said ‘a lot of damage’ was done ‘in the entire Berlin city area’, making it clear this was ‘in connection with the Middle East conflict’.
Another Star of David marked on a Jewish home in Berlin earlier this month
Berlin’s anti-Jewish sentiment could not be worse than in Neukolln, where the main avenue is lined with Muslim-run businesses, kebab shops, halal butchers, brothels, Middle Eastern cafes and mobile phone shops.
Until a recent law banned the inflammatory practice, flimsy stalls on the main drag, Sonnenallee, sold Palestinian flags, propaganda literature and regalia.
Walk down neon-lit Sonnenallee — known as ‘Arab Street’ — in the evening and you hear hardly a word of German. It was here, as news of Hamas’s attacks on Israel first horrified the world, that members of an anti-Israeli group handed out pastries and sweets to children to ‘celebrate the resistance of the Palestinian people’.
This action was considered so shocking that city police posted pictures of it on social media. When two German journalists approached the anti-Israeli group giving the sweets to ask their motives, they were told to stay away — or they would be killed.
Beneath the window of one pharmacy on Sonnenallee, in the days after the attack, ‘Glory to the Resistance in Gaza’ was spray-painted in black in Arabic.
Next to it on a wall, in bright green, was scrawled ‘Al-Quds Brigades’: the armed wing of Islamic Jihad, a terror organisation thought to have joined Hamas in its barbaric attack and widely blamed for the blast in the car park of a hospital on the Gaza Strip this week.
Pictures on the walls showed the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and the terrorist leaders of the Palestinian Liberation Front.
When we visited a kebab bar, run by young Palestinians in Sonnenallee on Thursday night, one handsome man in his twenties told us: ‘I am ashamed of what my countrymen are doing to Berlin, in Germany, and the Middle East.’
He was brave to say so. Other locals were less forthcoming. They raised their eyes as they watched me, a Westerner and a woman, walk the street without the Islamic hair cover of a hijab. There was no hostility, but incredulity to witness such a thing.
A Pro-Palestinian demonstrator is detained during a protest during the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, in Berlin, on October 13, 2023
Many Jews here are now living in fear. Children are being kept off school by parents frightened of what might happen if they are recognised for their religion on the streets.
A rabbi has said he hides his kippah, the traditional Jewish head-covering, under a baseball cap. A woman activist was arrested in central Berlin for shouting, in so many words, that Jews are an enemy who must die.
Rabbi Shloma Rottman, who lives in Jerusalem and is currently attending a seminar at Mr Lyubarsky’s synagogue, has voiced his shock at the arson, too. ‘I came from a war in Israel and thought I was safe in Germany. Now I feel more unsafe here than at home.’
According to Germany’s Council of Jews, the racist attacks are designed to terrorise the Jewish population by the ‘glorification of Hamas on German streets’. It said: ‘Hamas ideology of extermination of everything Jewish is having an effect here in Germany.’
Berlin’s anti-Semitism commissioner Samuel Salzborn has gone further, saying he fears for Germany’s Jews. The appearance of graffiti of the Star of David alone posed ‘a massive threat’ because history shows that this is a prelude to violence.
The Israeli embassy in Germany wrote on social media: ‘Berlin 2023. Houses where Jews live will be marked again.
‘This brings back the worst memories, especially in Germany, and is unbearable. They want to destroy us all, without exception.’
Few will fear that more than the 28-year-old woman in Berlin who came home to find the Star of David on the door of her apartment block.
She told the newspaper Bild: ‘I was driving with my friend, but when we came home, we saw it. It was a huge shock.’
Police scuffle with Pro-Palestinian demonstrators, as the conflict between Israel and Hamas continues, in Berlin on October 18, 2023
She later added: ‘I don’t know how they found me,’ explaining her worry that she had become a ‘target for Hamas sympathisers’ in Berlin because she wears the distinctive Jewish emblem openly. She has also posted messages on social media about ‘pro-Israel’ demonstrations and solidarity rallies in the city.
Another Berlin woman, identified as Yael in an interview she gave to an Israeli newspaper, said she saw similar graffiti on a building while walking her son to school: ‘It was a punch in the gut.’
Yael worried whether or not to send her children to class again. ‘In the end I kept them at home. They are in the state-school system, they speak German, most of their friends are German. Now it has come to the point where I have told them not to speak Hebrew out of the house.’
At the synagogue, between 20 and 30 per cent of the pupils at the kindergarten are off school because their parents are too afraid to send them. ‘We have a family who worship here who had the Star of David put on their door,’ said Mr Lyubarsky.
‘I asked the father how it has affected them. He is trying to remain calm, although we all know what it meant in the past.’
My Lyubarsky, who has a sister in Israel and a nephew in the armed forces there, said that two of his teachers have been called up to the Israeli Defence Force.
‘Here in Berlin, we have not been in a normal state since October 7, when Hamas entered Israel. Since then, we have lived through conflict on our streets that we never dreamed we would see again.
‘Now we are preparing to protect our own people,’ he added, admitting that he may soon, as other devout Jews are doing, hide his kippah under a baseball cap when he is on Berlin streets.
‘We are telling ourselves not to be panicked,’ he added very quietly, before shaking my hand goodbye.
‘We cannot run from Germany. This is our home.’
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