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The Or Avner Chabad School in Berlin- Charlottenburg. Rabbi Yehuda Teichtal, who is affiliated with the school, was shocked by the incident. “Also during the violent attack on Rabbi Daniel Alter, his little daughter was threatened. Again children are the target of anti-Semitism. This is unacceptable,” Teichtal said. He called on the Berlin authorities to do everything in their power to capture the perpetrators and to ensure Jewish safety in the city.
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BERLIN (EJP)--Unknown vandals desecrated six Jewish tombstones at a cemetery in the northeastern German city of Rostock with graffiti including Nazi swastikas, police announced Wednesday.
The attackers also daubed slogans in blue paint including "Shit Jews" and the Nazi rallying cry "Sieg Heil" on the exterior walls of the graveyard. The desecration took place on Monday.
"We are tracking one suspect in particular. There was probably a group with him but I cannot say for sure," a police spokeswoman told Agence France Presse.
Last year, 30 Jewish gravestones were desecrated in the western city of Essen on the night of April 20, Adolf Hitler's birthday.
Three men aged 18 to 20 were arrested, according to a Berlin-based group fighting hate crimes, the Amadeu Antonio Foundation.
Last week, Rabbi Daniel Alter was beaten in broad daylight on a Berlin street by four youths of Arab descent who also threatened to kill his six-year-old daughter.
Alter declared that the attackers approached him and asked, "Are you a Jew?" Then they blocked his way and began hitting him in the face, while hurling anti-Semitic curses.
The attack, which sent shock waves through the country's 200,000-strong Jewish community and made international headlines, came amid a bitter debate over a recent court ruling declaring that religious circumcision as practiced by Jews and Muslims amounted to grievous bodily harm.
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| Following last week’s attack, the head of one of Berlin’s local Jewish communities Reinhard Naumann called on daily Berliner Zeitung to launch a campaign to encourage local Germans to show solidarity with the Jewish victims of anti-Semitism, by donning a skullcap in protest. The newspaper subsequently captured politicians, celebrities and local citizens participating in the campaign. |
On Monday, a second attack occurred in the German capital when a group of 13 female Jewish schoolgirls from the Orthodox school ‘Or Avner’ were verbally assaulted with anti-Semitic slurs.
They said they were surrounded by boys and girls with a "Middle Eastern appearance. Police said that no one was physically hurt in the incident.
The leader of Berlin's Jewish community, Gideon Yoffe, denounced the attacks, and said it is "time that Muslim anti-Semitism bothered the Muslim side too."