Ahead of Holocaust Memorial Day on 27 January, which commemorates the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats have urged the German parliament, the Bundestag, to pass a resolution calling for migrants that promote hatred of Jews to be expelled.
“Whoever rejects Jewish life in Germany or questions Israel’s right to exist can have no place in our country,” the party’s draft resolution said. “We must resolutely confront the anti-Semitism of migrants with an Arab background and from African countries,” Stephan Harbarth, the Christian Democrats’ deputy parliamentary leader, told the German daily Die Welt. Protests erupted in Berlin after US President Donald Trump on 6 December announced that the US would move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
Demonstrators burned the Israeli flag and shouted in Arabic: “Jews, remember Khaybar, the army of Muhammad is returning.” The battle of Khaybar in which Muhammad defeated Jewish resistance took place in 628. With the arrival of over a million migrants, mostly Muslims from the Middle East and Africa, Germany faces newcomers from societies that tolerate or encourage hostility and discrimination towards Jews.
“In recent months, we have seen an increase in anti-Semitism in Germany,” the president of the German bishops’ conference, Cardinal Reinhard Marx, wrote to the president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Josef Schuster, last September. “Israel-related” anti-Semitism had grown especially.
After the demonstrations in Berlin last month, President Walter Steinmeier, a practising Lutheran, said that people who set Israeli flags on fire on German streets did not understand what it meant to be German. Germany’s historic responsibility for the Holocaust applied to everyone in the country, including those with migrant backgrounds. “That is non-negotiable for everyone who lives and wants to live in Germany!” he said. In his sermon on Christmas Day, the Bishop of Rottenburg-Stuttgart, Gebhard Fürst, warned that resentment of Jews was increasing as migrants who had fled to Germany were often anti-Semitic. “We must keep a close eye on these developments and intervene before people’s dignity is violated or perhaps even their lives threatened,” he said.
Meanwhile, the French government’s commissioner for anti- Semitism, Frédéric Potier, told Die Welt on 16 January that Jews in France were increasingly becoming victims of physical violence in their own homes. “Attacks on Jews are now occurring on a regular basis,” he said. The way in which Jews were attacked had changed. While attacks on synagogues and schools had dropped, due to better protection, Jews in France were now increasingly being attacked within their own four walls, Mr Potier explained. Since the murder of Sarah Halimi, a retired doctor and teacher, last April – she was first tortured in her apartment and then thrown out of the window – more and more French Jews were being attacked in their own homes.
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