Several violent anti-Semitic attacks took place over the weekend in Berlin and Zurich, The Jerusalem Post reported Sunday.
Three Germans and six Syrians were taken into custody on Saturday for allegedly assaulting a Syrian Jew in a park in Berlin’s Mitte district. The 19-year-old victim, who was wearing a Star of David, told authorities the suspects shouted “anti-Semitic insults,” beat him, and pulled a cigarette from his mouth. He had to be hospitalized.
In the Swiss capital Zurich, a German man threatened three Orthodox Jews with a knife. Local newspapers reported the perpetrator shouted anti-Semitic abuse, while pursuing his victims with his weapon. The man was stopped by a bystander and was detained by Swiss police. The prosecutor’s office has opened an investigation into the assault.
The incidents were the latest in a series of anti-Semitic attacks, which have rocked European cities in recent months.
A Syrian immigrant was sentenced in June by a court in Berlin to a four-week jail term for an anti-Semitic attack on an Israeli man and was ordered to undergo Holocaust education. The Syrian has appealed the sentence.
In March, 85-year-old Shoah survivor, Mireille Knoll, was stabbed to death and her body burned by her neighbor in Paris. Last year, a man shouting “Allahu akhbar” beat up Jewish schoolteacher Sarah Halimi and threw her to her death out of her Paris apartment window.
In the Paris suburbs, French children wearing religious symbols or the uniform of their Jewish school have been beaten and knifed, leading to Jewish leaders in France and Germany advising the Jewish communities not to wear kippahs in public anymore.
According to the annual “Antisemitism Worldwide” report by the Kantor Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry at Tel Aviv University, released in April, the “most disturbing” element of the study was “the prevalent ominous feeling of insecurity among Jews in Europe, recently intensified by the murder of two women in their homes in Paris.”
The report noted that, although the overall number of anti-Semitic attacks has declined, “recent violent cases have been perpetrated more brutally, causing more harm,” adding “The anti-Semitism atmosphere has become a public arena issue, intensively dealt with vis-a-vis a triangle made of the constant rise of the extreme right, a heated anti- Zionist discourse in the left, accompanied by harsh anti-Semitic expressions and radical Islamism.”
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