The first rabbi to be ordained since the Holocaust covers his kippa with a baseball cap for fear of anti-Semitic attacks.
The first rabbi to be ordained in Germany since the Holocaust is so worried about being identified as a Jew that he often wears a baseball hat over his skull cap.
“It’s a fact – it isn’t smart to display I’m Jewish. This is a problem and we have to face it,” German-born Daniel Alter, 47, told Reuters in an interview.
He is worried about neo-Nazi attacks and says anti-Semitism in Germany – still tortured by memories of the Holocaust in which Nazis wiped out six million Jews – puts the growth of Jewish communities here at risk.
As a Jew he feels unsafe in several German cities, not all in former communist east Germany where the far-right National Democratic Party (NPD) has made electoral gains recently.
Gee, I keep getting told by commenter after commenter that worldwide anti-Semitism is going down. So I guess this is just an example of how anti-Semitism is being eradicated:
The number of far-right offences in Germany, many of which were anti-Semitic, jumped 20 percent in the first eight months of 2006, according to the latest available police data.
Last year activists burned Holocaust victim Anne Frank’s diaries and made a teenager wear a sign saying he was a Jew. Many Jewish establishments have police guards and a German all-Jewish football team suffers weekly abuse.
The one thing I will say to Germany’s credit is that her politicians and many of her people are working against these creeps. But as to why anti-Semitism in Germany is rising, perhaps this could be one reason:
A report prepared at the request of the German Interior Ministry revealed that 5,000 Germans converted to Islam between July 2004 and June 2005, a figure that is four times higher than that of the previous year.
Looks like Germany’s 3 million Muslims are gaining a foothold.
This has been happening for some time.
I visited Germany in 1994 under a program that brought survivors and children of survivors over to examine their “roots.” The police guarding the Berlin Gemeindehaus on Fasanenstrasse were making visitors remove their hats (not their kippot) as someone had attempted to smuggle in a grenade a few weeks before. A few days later, I was making an early morning phone call home from a booth on Kurfurstendam, and a group of “youths” were walking up the street yelling “Juden aus! Auslandern aus!” And that was back in 1994.
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My son told me that when he went to Paris on a business trip you could spot the religious Jews very easily. They were the people wearing baseball caps.