JEWS ARE BEING ATTACKED DAILY IN BERLIN

Jewish leader : Jews are being attacked “daily” in Berlin (EJP)

BERLIN (EJP)--- The head of Berlin's Jewish community has said that attacks on Jews are becoming a daily ritual on the streets of the German capital. “We have been getting reports from school children about them having been at the centre of verbal and physical attacks,” Gideon Joffe told the DDP news agency. “Almost every day, we have been witnessing that the word ‘Jew’ is being used as a sexual and racist explicative… and that the children are beginning to think of this as something totally normal,” he said. 

Joffe was reacting to a physical attack by a group of Arab youths, last Friday, against a 14 year old Jewish girl in Berlin’s mainly Muslim Kreuzberg district. According to a police report, the girl was had often been at the centre of verbal attacks by Arab youths. The taunting began during the Israeli-Lebanon war, this summer. During one of the girl’s walks to school, she and a friend were even chased. Last Friday, the taunts and the chasing ended in blows to the girl’s head and back.“This is a new dimension, which anti-Semitism has been taking,” Joffe said. 

He stressed, however, that many of the reports of anti-Semitic taunts did not only stem from Muslims. Such attacks have come from across every religious and cultural group,” he said.  However, according to police reports, most attacks have been verbal and have come from segments of society made up primarily of migrants, usually Arabs.