German Jews, Scared Again

Less than two months before the 75th anniversary of the Holocaust’s end, a third far-right attack in under a year has German Jews questioning their future in the country.

Last Wednesday’s attack by a neo-Nazi left nine people of minority backgrounds dead in the town of Hanau, 25 kilometers from Frankfurt. It came after a far-right gunman failed to enter a shul in Halle on Yom Kippur, going on to murder two passersby; and ten months after the assassination of pro-immigration politician Walter Lubcke by a convicted member of the far right.

“No one thought before this Yom Kippur that something like the Halle attack would happen in Germany,” says Frankfurt’s Chief Rabbi Avichai Appel. “Paris and Brussels, yes, but not here, because Germany takes good care of Jews. And then we thought it was a problem in Berlin and the east of Germany that have large Muslim communities and lots of anti-Semitism.

“But this week it has come to this area, which is very multicultural. And even though it was not against Jews, it doesn’t matter — his first step was the hookah bar, but what was the next step?” said the rabbi about the gunman who had called for the extermination of Asians and Africans.