A 25-year-old Jewish man wearing a kippah bearing a Star of David was attacked Saturday outside a railway station in the German city of Potsdam, according to a report in the Berliner Morgenpost newspaper.
“When I got off the train at the main station I noticed shadows behind me,” the man said. He alleged that two men spat on him and yelled anti-Semitic epithets and threats.
A spokesperson for Brandburg police said on Sunday that two Syrian nationals were identified as alleged perpetrators, with “a possible xenophobic motive.”
The attack comes against the backdrop of a wave of attacks on Jews in Germany that has been so serious that German Anti-Semitism Commissioner Felix Klein said he could no longer recommend to Jews that they wear their kippot “everywhere and any time” in the country.
The statement provoked such outrage both locally and internationally that Klein retracted his remarks. A popular German newspaper, Bild, also printed a “cut-out” kippa on its front page for readers to wear in solidarity with the country’s Jewish population.
