A survey conducted for ARD public broadcasting—a joint organisation of Germany’s regional public-service broadcasters—and published on Friday, shows 59% of voting-age Germans believe that anti-Semitism is spreading in their own communities. This represents a 19% jump from last year’s survey which showed only 40% who claimed they were unaware of increased anti-Semitism.
The survey, conducted by Infratest, was based on interviews with 1,062 German voters, conducted between Monday and Wednesday, one week after the terrorist attempt to slaughter some 80 Jews in a synagogue in the city of Halle on Yom Kippur.
Only 35% of respondents said they had seen no increase in anti-Semitism across Germany – compared with last year’s 51% who saw no evil.
Two-thirds or more of Germans who voted for Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative;, the center-left Social Democrats (SPD); the Greens; and the former-communist left were aware of the rising anti-Semitism in their country.
On the far-right, 47% of the voters for Alternative for Germany (AfD) saw a rise in anti-Semitism, while 48% did not.
