Anti-Semitism is growing in Germany and there are still parts of the country where it is considered dangerous to be Jewish, the head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany said this weekend.
"In some districts in major cities, I'd advise people not to identify themselves as Jews,” Josef Schuster, who is also a WJC vice president, said in an interview with Bild am Sonntag cited by Deutsche Welle. "Experience has shown that openly wearing a kippa or a necklace with the Star of David is enough to attract verbal or physical threats.”
Schuster, who earlier this year had called for the government to establish an anti-Semitism commission, decried what he saw as a lack of progress in dealing with the problem.
"The EU Parliament has recommended that all member states appoint such a representative ... so it would be very strange if Germany didn't appoint a commissioner to fight anti-Semitism,” he was quoted as saying.
Last week the American Jewish Committee released a report stating that anti-Semitism was on the rise in the Berlin school system, especially among Turkish and Arab students.
According to the small-scale study, nearly thirty teachers from more than twenty schools around the German capital reported anecdotal evidence of an increase in the number of anti-Semitic incidents, including the use of the word Jew as a generic insult.
The researchers behind the report also cited "warnings from individual teachers and experts over the increasing spread of different forms of Salafism in Berlin schools.”
According to a separate study from the Hanns Seidel foundation that was released early last month, “more than half of Muslim asylum seekers showed clear tendencies of an anti-Semitic attitude pattern.”
