Berlin’s police chief on Monday advised the city’s Jewish and gay residents to be extra vigilant when traveling in neighborhoods with high Arab populations.
Barbara Slowik told the Berliner Zeitung newspaper that while there was only a small number of violent crimes against Jewish people in the city, any number of incidents is “too much.”
“Unfortunately, there are certain neighborhoods where there are mostly Arab people who also have sympathy for terrorist groups,” she said, advising those who wear kippot and openly gay people to “be more careful” in such areas.
Amid a surge in antisemitism worldwide since Hamas’s October 7 massacre last year, Berlin Police have opened 6,200 investigations into hate crimes and incitement targeting Jews, including social media posts and property damage, Slowik said.
Violent offenses make up 1,300 of those probes, mainly involving assaults or resistance to police. Slowik acknowledged that the increasing number of incidents has raised fears among the Jewish community.
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Two weeks ago, Makkabi Berlin’s youth football team said they were “hunted down” by a gang of youths armed with sticks and knives shouting “free Palestine and “f*cking Jews,” after playing a game in Neukölln, a neighborhood with a large Arab and Turkish population.
File: German police officers stand guard in front of the building complex of the Kahal Adass Jisroel community, which houses a synagogue, a kindergarten, and a community center, in the center of Berlin, Germany, October 18, 2023. (AP/Markus Schreiber)
In another incident in Berlin earlier this year, a university student beat up a Jewish classmate, who had to be hospitalized, after the two got into an argument about the Israel-Hamas war.
Shortly after the October 7, 2023, Hamas massacre in Israel, a synagogue in Berlin’s Mitte neighborhood was attacked with Molotov cocktails.
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