BERLIN (EJP)--- A tragedy was avoided on Sunday after a smoke bomb, thrown through a window of a Jewish kindergarten in Berlin, failed to ignite.

However, the school, located in a northwest neighbourhood of the German capital, was not spared by the spray painting of swastikas, other Nazi symbols and anti-Semitic phrases, such as “Auschwitz,” “Juden Raus” (Jews, get out) and “Sieg Heil”, on its outer walls, as well as on toys that had been lying around in the school’s playground.

A police spokesman said the attack did not cause serious damage or endanger children or staff at the school.

Berlin’s Interior Minister Ehrhart Körting condemned the attack as a "cowardly act" and called it “a particularly brutal one…one that had taken anti-Semitic acts to a new dimension”.

First time

Although individual Jewish children have occasionally been victims of anti-Semitism, it is the first time that an entire school had been targeted in Germany.

So far, no suspects have been found. Police are still investigating when exactly the attack took place and appealed for witnesses.

However, it seems as if it was planned to coincide with the inauguration of a new Torah scroll which took place on Sunday, several kilometres away, at the Chabad Lubavitch synagogue of the Jewish Family and Education Centre which runs the school.

“It was a miracle that the smoke bomb did not get off,” Rabbi Yehuda Teichtal of Chabad Lubavitch in Berlin, said.

The school is located in a villa, in a quiet park of the city’s Charlottenburg district.

Because the location had only been considered as temporary, the property was not secured in the same way that other Jewish buildings.

Instead of round-the-clock police protection, security guards came only in hourly intervals.

Three months after Vienna

The attack happened exactly three months to day after a Croatian national broke into the Lauder Chabad School in Vienna, Austria, and systematically smashed windows and porcelain with a crowbar.

The man, who called himself “Adolf Hitler”, later admitted that he was driven by anti-Semitic sentiments.

Stephan Kramer, secretary general of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, has accused the Berlin State Senate as well as Berlin’s local Jewish community of not having taken the necessary precautions to  help divert such an attack.

“In today’s world, we know that such attacks are possible and could strike at any time… It is beyond me how security could have been so lax”.

Kramer was embarrassed that rabbis from around the world that were present at the Torah inauguration ceremony, had to experience first hand what an anti-Semitic act in Germany meant.

Gideon Joffe, who heads Berlin’s Jewish community, called the attack “a natural development resulting from last year’s election of several extreme right wing politicians to Berlin’s local parliament”.

Last summer, Stephan Kramer made public his concerns about the acute threat posed to Jewish sites in Germany.

Although Wolfgang Bosbach, vice president of the ruling Christian Democratic parliamentary group, and Dieter Wiefelspuetz, speaker of the Social Democratic parliamentary group, believed that there was no official indication of an increase in danger for Jewish buildings, Konrad Freiberg, chairman of the police union, predicted the contrary.