Neo-Nazis attack kosher restaurant in Germany
Masked men said to have broken into ‘Schalom’ restaurant in Chemnitz, throwing rocks and shouting 'get out of Germany, Jewish pigs' during far-right demonstrations; Germany's anti-Semitism commissioner says attack is reminiscent of 1930s.'
German media reported Saturday that German authorities are investigating an anti-Semitic attack on a Jewish-owned restaurant that took place during the far-right demonstrations at the end of August in the eastern city of Chemnitz.
Police in Saxony confirmed that they had received a complaint of the attack on the kosher restaurant "Schalom" on the sidelines of the demonstrations.
According to Die Welt newspaper's reports, on August 27, a mob of around a dozen people, wearing black with their faces covered, hurled rocks, bottles and a metal pipe at the restaurant, smashing one of its windows and vandalizing the entrance.
The masked demonstrators stormed the restaurant and shouted "Get out of Germany, Jewish pigs." Many chanted “We are the people,” a slogan used by far-right supporters.
The restaurant's owner, Uwe Dziuballa, suffered an injury to the shoulder during the attack, the reports said.
"Schalom" restaurant, which opened in 2000, has been attacked several times before. A spokesman for the German Federal Ministry of the Interior confirmed that the reports are being investigated on suspicion of being motivated by anti-Semitism, but no clear conclusion has been drawn.
The German Federal Commissioner to Combat anti-Semitism, Felix Klein, called on the police and the State Prosecutor's Office to bring the perpetrators to justice and show that similar cases in the future will be severely punished.
"If the reports are true, this is a new level of anti-Semitism. It's impossible not to compare this to what happened in the 1930s," Klein said.
Chemnitz has been convulsed by violent far-right, anti-immigration demonstrations since the a German man was stabbed to death, allegedly by asylum-seekers, on August 26.
The police arrested two asylum seekers from Syria and Iraq on suspicion of murdering the German man, 35, while conducting a search for the third suspect.
The Chemnitz attack is the latest in a series of violent crimes by refugees that have garnered massive media attention and stoked anger at German Chancellor Angela Merkel's decision to allow in more than one million migrants and refugees since 2015.
Far-right groups and thousands of local citizens have taken to the streets since the stabbing, mainly at night, with some seen flashing the illegal Nazi salute. In several cases violent riots were reported that included attacks on police officers, journalists and passers-by who were suspected of being migrants.
Chancellor Angela Merkel condemned the demonstrations and said that the scenes from Chemnitz "convey a message of hatred towards innocent people."
“That was a horrible incident. What we saw afterwards is something that has no place in a state under the rule of law,” she told a news conference in Berlin.
“We don’t tolerate such unlawful assemblies and the hounding of people who look different or have different origins, and attempts to spread hatred on the streets,” Merkel’s spokesman Steffen Seibert told a regular news briefing.
"That has no place in our cities and we, as the German government, condemn it in the strongest terms. Our basic message for Chemnitz and beyond is that there is no place in Germany for vigilante justice, for groups that want to spread hatred on the streets, for intolerance and for extremism," Seibert concluded.
