Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

German Jew Wearing Kippah Is Beaten on Berlin Street

BERLIN — Unknown perpetrators kicked and beat a 21-year-old Jewish man wearing a kippah after slurring him with anti-Semitic insults.

The victim, identified as Oliver Geffers of Bonn, was slightly injured in the Tuesday evening attack but did not seek medical help, according to the police report on the incident. The state criminal police agency is investigating.

Geffers is not Orthodox but wears a kippah in public because he strongly identifies as Jewish and believes Jews should not be afraid to show their identity, a source close to Geffers told JTA. Geffers works as a volunteer at a refugee center in Cologne and said he does not experience open anti-Semitism from refugees, according to the source.

According to the police report, the incident occurred Tuesday at approximately 9:30 p.m. in a park along Puschkinallee, a main thoroughfare. The victim said the three attackers appeared to be Arabic. They commented on his yarmulke and insulted him with anti-Semitic comments. One of them then beat and kicked him, he reported, before all the men fled.

In March, the Berlin-based Department for Research and Information on Anti-Semitism reported that there were 34 percent more anti-Semitic incidents reported in 2015 than in the previous year. The independent organization was founded that year by the Berlin-based Association for Democratic Culture with the aim of looking beyond the official statistics.

In all, the organization reported 401 incidents in 2015 in Berlin, less than half of which were included in official police statistics. Of the 401 cases, 151 involved threats, bullying and attacks; 31 individuals were injured, most of whom were openly identifiable as Jewish by wearing religious clothing or articles.

A source who had seen photos of the victim said there were open wounds in his leg, which suggested the attack had been brutal.

 

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.