Archive for November 27th, 2008

A group of idealistic, mostly non-Jewish young Germans is tackling anti-Semitism in a Muslim-dominated neighborhood.

by Sharon Udasin
Staff Writer

Berlin — On a December afternoon in 2006, in a predominantly Turkish section of this rapidly changing Berlin, a 14-year-old girl was walking home from the Lisa Morgenstern High School with her Muslim classmates, as they did most days. But the friendships ended when, one day, the girl casually mentioned that she was Jewish. In the next few weeks, those classmates and others hurled anti-Semitic insults at her and even attacked her physically, delivering blows to her back and head.

The incident, told by a neighborhood anti-discrimination activist, wasn’t an isolated one. Last year alone, there were 1,541 crimes against Jews reported in Germany, according to a Reuters faith blog. Yet while neo-Nazi-based anti-Semitism is well documented and remains a significant problem in Germany, the
phenomenon of Muslim anti-Semitism is growing and only now coming into sharper view.

Turkish immigrants began to pour into West Berlin as “guest workers” with the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961. As the country’s Muslim population has soared — there are now more than two million Turkish Muslims in Germany, many of them working-class — so has the problem of hatred against Jews. The attacks of 9/11 and flare-ups in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have exacerbated the problem here, as they have throughout much of Europe, especially in France.

But a group of idealistic and ethnically mixed young Germans — some Jewish, most not — is working to combat the problem. And the group is taking its fight into the heart of Kreuzberg, the central Berlin neighborhood located just south of the fashionable Mitte district and east of the sprawling greenery of Tiergarten Park. The neighborhood is home to a huge Muslim population, consisting mostly of Turks, but also including Palestinian refugees and South Asian Muslims.

Armed only with play-acting techniques, memory games and the powerful stories of Kreuzberg Holocaust survivors, members of the group — officially dubbed the Kreuzberg Initiative Against Anti-Semitism — go into Kreuzberg’s high school classrooms with a noble but excruciatingly difficult goal: trying to break down long-held stereotypes and bridge a gaping ethnic gulf.

“There are many programs that deal with radical right people like the Nazis,” said Karoline Georg, 28, one of the Kreuzberg Initiative fellows. “There are many programs against racism and anti-Semitism. It took a really long time before [the government funded] projects like ours.”

[[To read the rest of my story from this week's Jewish Week, click here...]]