Jewish Kindergarten Target of Anti-Semitic Attack

(EJP) Vandals attacked a Jewish school on Sunday, throwing a smoke bomb through the window of the Berlin kindergarten and spray-painting  swastikas and neo Nazi graffiti on the exterior walls of the building. 

The school, Chabad Or Avner, was empty at the time of the attack, but the incident was characterized by the city’s Interior Minister Ehrhart Körting  as “…one that had taken anti-Semitic acts to a new dimension.”

Although individual Jewish children have occasionally been victims of anti-Semitism, it is the first time that an entire school had been targeted in Germany.

So far, no suspects have been found. Police are still investigating the attack.

The attack came at the same time that a new Torah scroll was dedicated several kilometres away, at the Chabad Lubavitch synagogue of the Jewish Family and Education Centre which runs the school.

“It was a miracle that the smoke bomb did not get off,” Rabbi Yehuda Teichtal of Chabad Lubavitch in Berlin, said.

The school is located in a villa, in a quiet park of the city’s Charlottenburg district.

Jewish buildings in Germany typically have 24-hour security protection, but because this is a temporary facility, the building had minimal security.

Three months after Vienna

The attack comes three months after a Croatian national broke into the Lauder Chabad School in Vienna, Austria, and systematically smashed windows and porcelain with a crowbar.

The man, who called himself “Adolf Hitler,”, later admitted that he was motivated by anti-semitism.

Stephan Kramer, secretary general of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, has accused the Berlin State Senate as well as Berlin’s local Jewish community of not having taken the necessary precautions to help prevent such an attack.

“In today’s world, we know that such attacks are possible and could strike at any time… It is beyond me how security could have been so lax”.

Gideon Joffe, who heads Berlin’s Jewish community, called the attack “a natural development resulting from last year’s election of several extreme right wing politicians to Berlin’s local parliament”.

Last summer, Stephan Kramer made public his concerns about the acute threat posed to Jewish sites in Germany.

Although Wolfgang Bosbach, vice president of the ruling Christian Democratic parliamentary group, and Dieter Wiefelspuetz, speaker of the Social Democratic parliamentary group, maintain that there is no official indication of a rise in attacks on Jewish buildings, Konrad Freiberg, chairman of the police union, predicted the contrary.

Adapted from a report by Oliver Bradley for the European Jewish Press