Dear Reader,
Exactly seven years ago, I interviewed a 21-year-old woman, Katja, outside of a Jewish supermarket in Berlin.
It was 2019 and a far-right terrorist had just tried to storm a synagogue in Halle on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar. He failed to get inside, but killed two people nearby.
While Katja was shaken up, gazing at the two security guards at a synagogue across the street, she was hopeful that life for Jews in Germany wouldn’t get any worse.
She was proud of her identity, she told me, and didn’t want to live in fear.
I thought of Katja last month as I hastened my pace walking past the same supermarket and synagogue, which is now barricaded by large metallic slabs. It too has been repeatedly targeted. In one incident, two masked attackers hurled Molotov cocktails at the building.
Seven years after Halle, life for many Jews in Berlin has not gotten any easier. Quite the opposite.
But the ideological landscape has changed. Whereas the far-right once accounted for the overwhelming majority of recorded antisemitic offences, Berlin's police statistics now show a much more fragmented picture. The largest category is what authorities classify as ‘foreign ideology’, a category that includes Israel-related and Islamist extremism.
That’s fuelled a wider debate over whether antisemitism associated with parts of the Middle East has been imported through migration. But the statistics don’t allow such a simple conclusion: “foreign ideology” describes a political motivation, not the ethnicity, religion or migration history of the perpetrator.
One thing is clear: Since Hamas’ attack on Israel on the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah three years ago — and the devastating war that has followed — antisemitic incidents in Berlin have surged.