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 crowd came to collect the German Jews. Wearing masks, they crept through deserted streets on foot at dawn to throw Molotov cocktails at a Berlin synagogue and deface the Star of David on the front door of a family worshiping there.
On Thursday evening, standing outside the synagogue where he presides, Pasha Lybarsky asked me sadly: “How could this happen in Germany after the Holocaust?”
Two police officers now stand guard 24 hours a day next to the barricaded building, which also houses a school and a kindergarten. Naturally, the attack had repulsive consequences of the era when Germany’s Jews were systematically persecuted in the run-up to and beyond during World War II.
On an infamous night in 1938, a year before war broke out, Hitler’s henchmen launched a brutal attack on German Jews in Berlin and other cities. Synagogues were set on fire and the windows of Jewish homes and shops were smashed. Many were defaced in advance with the Star of David to mark them for attack.
In the week after Kristallnacht, 30,000 Jewish men were sent to concentration camps.
A Star of David was spray-painted outside a building in Berlin’s Prenzlauberg district earlier this month
A Jewish-run shop in Berlin was defaced with graffiti during the anti-Semitic campaign of June 1938
But this week in Berlin it wasn’t a Nazi mob tormenting the few remaining Jews living here — just 9,000 in a city of 3.7 million. Instead, Hamas supporters and defenders are suspected of carrying out the attack — including defacing 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 caretaker chased him away.
In a playground not far from the synagogue, a Jewish mother was babysitting her two-year-old child when she left her bag on a bench.
When she returned to collect it, the ground next to where she had been sitting was defaced with the Star of David.
As fear has grown, protests demanding the destruction of Israel took place in Berlin this week.
Pro-Palestinian agitators on the left were joined by sympathetic migrants of the first, second and perhaps third generations (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 fire to barricades and cars while chanting anti-Jewish slogans. Street fighting lasted from Wednesday afternoon until 2 a.m. the next day in Berlin’s multicultural suburb of Neukolln, where a thousand “emotional” people fought with police. Some waved pro-Palestinian flags and wore hoodies and distinctive black-and-white scarves.
An Israeli flag was pulled down from a building. Graffiti with a Star of David was found nearby. Officers said that ‘much damage’ had been caused ‘in the entire Berlin city area’, clarifying that this was ‘related to the conflict in the Middle East’.
Earlier this month, another Star of David was marked on a Jewish home in Berlin
Anti-Jewish sentiment in Berlin couldn’t be worse than in Neukolln, where the main street is lined with Muslim-run businesses, kebab shops, halal butchers, brothels, Middle Eastern cafes and mobile phone shops.
Until a recent law banned this incendiary practice, flimsy stalls on the main drag, Sonnenallee, sold Palestinian flags, propaganda literature and regalia.
Walk down the neon-lit Sonnenallee, also known as ‘Arab Street’, at night and you’ll hardly hear a word of German. It was here, when news of Hamas’s attacks on Israel first horrified the world, that members of an anti-Israel group distributed cakes and sweets to children to “celebrate the resistance of the Palestinian people.”
This action was considered so shocking that city police posted photos of it on social media. When two German journalists approached the anti-Israel group distributing the sweets to ask about their motives, they were told to stay away – or they would be killed.
In the days after the attack, ‘Glory to the Resistance in Gaza’ was spray-painted in black in Arabic under the window of a pharmacy on Sonnenallee.
Next to it, scrawled in bright green on a wall was “Al-Quds Brigades”: the armed wing of Islamic Jihad, a terrorist organization believed to have joined Hamas in its barbaric attack and widely blamed for the explosion in the parking lot of a hospital in the Gaza Strip this week.
Pictures on the walls showed the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and the terrorist leaders of the Palestine Liberation Front.
When we visited a kebab bar run by young Palestinians on Sonnenallee on Thursday evening, a handsome man in his twenties told us: “I am ashamed of what my compatriots are doing to Berlin, Germany and the Middle East.”
He dared to say that. Other locals were less helpful. They raised their eyes when they saw me, a Westerner and a woman, walking down the street without the Islamic hair covering of a hijab. There was no hostility, just disbelief to see something like that.
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 now live in fear. Children are kept out of school by parents who are afraid of what could happen if they were recognized for their religion on the street.
A rabbi has said he hides his yarmulke, the traditional Jewish head covering, under a baseball cap. A female 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, also expressed shock at the arson. ‘I came from a war in Israel and thought I was safe in Germany. Now I feel less safe here than at home.’
According to the German Council of Jews, the racist attacks are intended to terrorize the Jewish population by “glorifying Hamas on the German streets.” It said: “The Hamas ideology of exterminating everything Jewish is having an effect here in Germany.”
Berlin’s anti-Semitism commissioner Samuel Salzborn has gone further and says he fears for Germany’s Jews. The mere appearance of graffiti with the Star of David posed ‘an enormous threat’ because history shows that this is a harbinger of violence.
The Israeli embassy in Germany wrote on social media: ‘Berlin 2023. Houses where Jews live are marked again.
‘This brings back the worst memories, especially in Germany, and is unbearable. They want to destroy us all, without exception.’
Few would fear this more than the 28-year-old woman in Berlin who came home to find the Star of David on the door of her apartment building.
She told Bild newspaper: ‘I was driving with my friend, but when we got home we saw it. It was a huge shock.’
Police battle with pro-Palestinian protesters 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 concerns that she had become a “target for Hamas sympathizers” in Berlin because she openly wears the distinctive Jewish emblem. She has also posted 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 about whether or not she should send her children back to class. ‘I ended up keeping them at home. They are in the state school system, they speak German and most of their friends are German. Now it has gotten to the point where I have told them not to speak Hebrew outside the home.”
In the synagogue, between 20 and 30 percent of kindergarten students do not go to school because their parents are too afraid to send them. “We have a worshiping family here who had the Star of David put on their door,” Mr. Lybarsky said.
‘I asked the father how it affected them. He’s trying to stay calm, even though we all know what that meant back in the day.”
My Lyubarsky, who has a sister in Israel and a cousin in the armed forces there, said two of his teachers have been drafted into the Israeli army.
“Here in Berlin we have not been in a normal situation since October 7, when Hamas entered Israel. Since then, we have experienced conflicts 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 will soon, as other devout Jews do, hide his yarmulke under a baseball cap when on the streets of Berlin.
“We tell ourselves not to panic,” he added very quietly, before shaking my hand.
‘We cannot flee from Germany. This is our home.’