A Jewish man was badly beaten by several men in the center of Berlin on New Year’s Eve, after he asked them to stop singing anti-Semitic songs. The victim, Shahak Shapira, 26, suffered bruises and a head laceration. He said the assailants were “southern European” in appearance and spoke both German and Arabic. Police say…
Salaam-Schalom organizes a Jewish-Muslim human chain event in Neukollen / Ömer Sefa Baysal This past summer, Armin Langer, a 24-year-old rabbinical student in Berlin, came to speak at the Sehitlik mosque in Neukoelln, a district of the German capital with a large Muslim population. Langer is the co-founder of the Salaam-Schalom Initiative, a Neukoelln-based intercultural…
An Israeli man visiting Berlin suffered a black eye and fractured fingers in a street attack. The Israeli, 22, said he was beaten and kicked Sunday evening after leaving synagogue by four men who spoke German with an Arabic accent, according to reports. “I have no doubt they attacked me because I looked Jewish or…
Rising anti-Semitism in Europe threatens not only Jews but overall European values, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, said at a conference on anti-Semitism in Berlin. The event, which concluded Thursday, was organized by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe to mark the 10th anniversary of the first OSCE conference…
In the fall of 1972 I moved to Berlin from Frankfurt, Germany, to begin my studies at the Free University, which was founded in 1948 in the American zone. The upper-middle-class villas of this section of town had not been bombed during World War II; they had once been owned by well-to-do Jews who had…
The French writer François Mauriac is quoted with the sentence, “I love Germany so much that I am glad that there are two of them.” This was pretty much the attitude among the Jewish community in Germany, in which I grew up in the 1970s and ’80s. The Jews of postwar Germany felt protected by…
Getty Images The lettuce sold in supermarkets near my home in the German capital comes mostly from Spain, which means it travels over a thousand miles before reaching my salad bowl. InFarm, a Berlin-based urban agriculture start-up founded by a group of Israelis, is experimenting with an alternative that is more environmentally friendly, healthier and…
In my parents’ basement I found a box of my grandfather’s, marked “C.J. Wildman, personal”; inside it I discovered another, smaller file box labeled “Patient Correspondence, A–G.” The letters were not from patients; they were from the life he left behind in Vienna when he fled the Nazis: half-siblings, cousins, friends — and a girlfriend….
