Europe Germany Struggles With an Unfamiliar Form of Anti-Semitism With prejudice against Jews cropping up among migrants, fears grow that ‘a new generation of anti-Semites is coming of age in Germany’By Bojan Pancevski
https://www.wsj.com/articles/germany-struggles-with-an-unfamiliar-form-of-anti-semitism-1522584002?cx_testId=16&cx_testVariant=cx&cx_artPos=1&cx_tag=collabctx&cx_navSource=newsReel#cxrecs_s
“Levi Salomon, head of the Jewish Forum for Democracy against Anti-Semitism, a Berlin-based organization that documents hate crimes against Jews, says most violent incidents these days come from Muslim perpetrators.”
BERLIN— Solomon Michalski loved going to his new school on a leafy Berlin street because it was vibrant and diverse, with most students from migrant families. But when the teenage grandson of Holocaust survivors let it slip that he was Jewish, former friends started hissing insults at him in class, he says. Last year some of them brandishing what looked like a gun took him aside and said they would execute him.
It was no isolated occurrence. The police registered 1,453 anti-Semitic incidents in Germany last year, more than in five of the previous seven years, and organizations including the American Jewish Congress say fewer than a third of such incidents get reported. Their stubborn persistence in the country where the Holocaust was plotted and executed is raising concern that decades of work to eradicate anti-Semitism are slowly being undone as prejudice against Jews spreads beyond its traditional home in the far right.
“I fear that a new generation of anti-Semites is coming of age in Germany,” Josef Schuster, head of the country’s chief Jewish organization, told journalists on Wednesday.
German police attribute more than 90% of cases nationwide to far-right offenders. But Jewish activists and victim representatives say the data are misleading because police automatically label any incident where the perpetrators aren’t known as coming from the far right.
The problem goes beyond Germany. The murder of an elderly Holocaust survivor in Paris in March in what prosecutors said was an anti-Semitic attack has fueled a perception that anti-Jewish acts—from casual insults to brutal violence—are on the rise across Europe and that governments appear unable to do much about it.
Levi Salomon, head of the Jewish Forum for Democracy against Anti-Semitism, a Berlin-based organization that documents hate crimes against Jews, says most violent incidents these days come from Muslim perpetrators. CONTINUE AT SITE
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