Almost 2,000 anti-Semitic incidents in Germany became known last year. Experts assume an even higher number of unreported cases. The corona pandemic definitely has an impact on this.
According to data from the Federal Association of Research and Information Centers Antisemitism (Rias), anti-Semitic incidents were recorded across Germany in 1909. That was a good five a day.
In the previous year there were 1252. However, this time the federal association included 472 incidents from federal states in which there are no Rias reporting points and which had not previously been taken into account. The majority of the incidents (1449) in 2020 related to “hurtful behavior”, as can be seen from the Rias annual report presented on Monday in Berlin. These include anti-Semitic abuse.
There was an increase here, according to Rias. The number of known “violent attacks” on Jews, however, fell from 109 to 96, the number of threats from 58 to 39, which the association explains with the lockdown and the associated restrictions, for example at large events. Under “extreme violence”, the statistics show a case in which a 29-year-old attacked a Jewish student in front of the Hamburg synagogue with a folding spade and seriously injured him.
A total of 677 people and 679 institutions were affected by anti-Semitic incidents. Rias assumes that the number of unreported cases is even higher.
Abraham Lehrer, Vice President of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, said he had to deal with these issues every day, but that 677 people had been insulted and vilified in anti-Semitic terms particularly struck him. “These are things that are terrible.” These numbers showed how important the work of Rias is. Many parishioners were reluctant to report such incidents to official bodies or even to report them.
Rias federal board member Benjamin Steinitz said: “In more than half (52 percent) of the incidents, no political and ideological background could be assigned.” With around a quarter of all incidents (479), however, most of them were from the right-wing extremist, right-wing populist spectrum, followed by those with a conspiratorial ideological background.
According to the data, more than a quarter of all documented cases (489) were directly related to the corona pandemic. It was about anti-Semitic content that was disseminated at gatherings against corona measures, for example in speeches or on signs and posters. “In a large number of demonstrations throughout Germany, anti-Semitic conspiracy myths and trivializations of the Shoah were expressed in particular,” the report says.
Between mid-March and the end of 2020, Rias recorded a total of 284 meetings at which Corona measures were equated with the National Socialist persecution of Jews or other anti-Semitic statements were made.
Steinitz explained that the corona pandemic was an occasion to articulate existing anti-Semitic attitudes. The “limits of what can be said” would also be expanded in the middle of society. “In the Corona crisis we see a threatening normalization of anti-Semitism, but also of racism, media and science hostility,” Steinitz stated. “These border shifts never return to the state before such a dynamic began.”
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