Anti-Semitic attacks have increased markedly in Germany in recent months. Last week a 46-year-old rabbi was severely beaten by two assailants while standing on a train platform in Berlin; police charged two 15-year-old Arabs. “The violence has escalated to an unbearable degree,” said Paul Spiegel, president of the Central Jewish Committee in Germany, who believes that the renewed intifada in the Middle East is partly responsible. In a wave of revulsion that followed the cemetery attack, 4,000 Potsdam students took to the streets to protest racism; the Brandenburg state government offered $5,000 for information leading to the arrest of the vandals. But it will take more than reward money and protests to bury the country’s most intractable problem.
