Our antennae are up: Rise in anti-Semitism unsettles Germany

The denim kippah on display in the Jewish Museum in Berlin belongs to Adam Armoush, the young Israeli who was assaulted with a belt by a 19-year-old Syrian in Prenzlauer Berg in April. A symbol of religiosity, it amounts to an accusation. Look, it says, someone was attacked in central Berlin for wearing this kippah.

Florian is a 19-year-old high school student. He was on vacation in Israel when he heard about the attack. He was shocked. Prenzlauer Berg is his neighborhood and he has always felt safe there. He also wears a kippah, one that’s black and crocheted, held in place atop his red hair by two pins. He still wears it, but he’s become more cautious. He takes it off when he’s on public transport or if he’s out alone in certain neighborhoods. He’s afraid he could be attacked. For being Jewish…

Soon he’ll finish his exams and be done with school. He can finally turn the page on what in many ways has become an ordeal. He’s a slim, gentle young man, eloquent, well-read, politically aware. For five months, he would only enter the school via a side entrance and spent every recess alone in an art classroom in a far corner of the building. It was his decision, he says. After what happened in the school cafeteria, he didn’t feel safe.

This is how he describes it: He was listening to music and doing homework in a free period. “A group of Muslim students came up to me. They were seniors. They said they wanted to talk to me about Trump relocating the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem. The usual stuff came up: ‘You stole our land! Where are you Jews from anyway? You’re a bunch of child murderers!’ I explained it to them again: ‘You didn’t agree to the UN Partition Plan, you wanted to destroy us, you’ve always wanted the whole country.’” At some point, they all stood up and a Lebanese girl said: “Wallah! Hitler was a good man because he killed Jews.”

Florian was shocked, he says, but he tried to keep arguing. “I called out: ‘This girl is glorifying the Holocaust, she’s celebrating the mass murder of more than 6 million Jews!’” Then an Arab student grabbed him and “more or less dragged me around the cafeteria,” while others shouted “Israel is the murderer, Israel is the murderer.”

There’s a message from the principal on the Ernst Reuter High School website condemning the “anti-Semitic incident,” which occurred “in the context of a dispute over the Middle East conflict.” The principal did not respond to requests for further comment. According to Saraya Gomis, the anti-discrimination commissioner for the Berlin Education Department, the school is working through the issue. She sees anti-Semitism as being symptomatic of blatant racism in schoolyards and classrooms, and believes teachers are complicit.