‘Antisemitism is poisoning our society’ says Olaf Scholz at Berlin synagogue that was destroyed 85 years ago and is again target of firebombing

There could hardly have been a more powerfully symbolic setting for a ceremony to mark the 85th anniversary of the 1938 November pogroms than the Beth Zion synagogue.

The place of worship in the heart of Berlin was largely destroyed in the violence that exploded on the night of 9 November that year, when Nazi thugs carried out murderous, state-sponsored attacks on Jewish property and homes.

The building was painstakingly rebuilt and completed in 2014 on the original site. And then, three weeks ago, it was firebombed, attacked with molotov cocktails by two masked men as Germany witnessed a rise in antisemitic incidents in the wake of Israel’s war with Hamas.

On Thursday, with police marksmen and armoured vehicles guarding the synagogue, 102-year-old Margot Friedländer took her place in the congregation alongside family members of some of the 240 Israeli hostages currently being held captive by Hamas.

As a teenager, Friedländer experienced the 1938 attacks, which led to her and her family’s deportation to concentration camps. She was the only one to survive.

Wearing a kippah, the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, gave an emotional speech in which he condemned the spate of antisemitic attacks across the country and pledged to protect the nation’s Jews from a “shameful” wave of “intolerance and inhumanity”.

His insistence that Germany would uphold its decades-long promise to protect Israel and ensure the Holocaust was never repeated felt fragile. Referring to the fear Jewish people have increasingly reported feeling on the streets of Germany in recent years, he said: “Something is surely coming apart at the seams.”

“Antisemitism,” he added, “is poisoning our society. If Jews in Germany have to live behind ever bigger protective shields, then that is intolerable.”

He condemned people who had celebrated the recent murder of Israeli citizens at pro-Palestinian gatherings in Berlin, saying that “nothing, absolutely nothing – not your origins, not your political conviction, not your cultural background, no supposed post-colonial view of history – can be offered as justification for revelling in the murder, the savage slaughter of innocents”.

In an apparent warning to the far-right, which has adopted a brazenly Islamophobic stance, he added: “At the same time, we must not be taken in by those who are now seeing an opportunity to deny the place of more than 5 million Muslim citizens in our society.”

Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews, said anyone seeking to understand why the attack on Israel had caused such trauma among German Jews had to be aware of “what is going on in Jewish souls 85 years after the Reichspogromnacht when Stars of David are painted on Jewish houses and Jewish businesses are attacked once more, when arson attacks are carried out on synagogues again like they were here [at Beth Zion] just weeks ago”.

Sometimes referred to as Kristallnacht, the orchestrated attacks that rocked Berlin 85 years ago fuelled the subsequent systematic slaughter of 6 million European Jews in the Holocaust.

In the wake of the Israel-Hamas war, this year’s anniversary has been enveloped by a mood of fear and despair and given a raw and shocking new dimension, incomparable to events in previous years.

Incidents among the approximately 2,000 antisemitic attacks reported in Germany since 7 October have included the painting of Stars of David on Jewish homes and institutes and the spreading of antisemitic slogans.

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The resulting pessimism has prompted many organisers of events around this anniversary to adopt the slogan “‘Never Again’ is Now”, an adaptation of Nie Wieder (‘never again’), the postwar slogan drummed into every German.

Across the country at synagogues and Jewish institutes, and at sites of former destroyed synagogues, politicians, Jewish leaders and other Germans held commemorations on Thursday. 

In a solemn Bundestag debate focused on marking the anniversary in the context of the current war, interior minister Nancy Faeser said she was “ashamed” and “heartbroken” to see how German Jews were fearful of revealing their identity in public.

At a Jewish community hall on Fasanenstrassse, in a district of western Berlin where approximately 100 Jewish businesses were attacked that night, the names of 55,696 victims of the pogrom – those either murdered that night, at the concentration camps to which they were deported, or who killed themselves – were read out through the day. 

An image of the synagogue which was destroyed that night was projected on to the building.

At the Deutsches Theater in Berlin,the Nobel prize winning laureate Herta Müller was one of several intellectuals to recite from the works of the philosopher Hannah Arendt and other Jewish writers.

Despite fears of anti-Israel protests being held during the commemorations, police reported no major incidents, although the state library was investigating how someone managed to smuggle projection equipment on to its premises and beam anti-Israel slogans on to the walls.

Friedländer, née Bendheim, recalled returning home after the pogrom to scenes of desecration. “We didn’t have radio or telephone, but we were aware of the extent of what was happening, and that the synagogues were burning,” she said.

She was sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, while other family members, including her parents, were deported to Auschwitz, where they were murdered.

She returned this week to her former Berlin home and bent down to polish the brass stolpersteine – memorial plaques set into the pavement – marking her and her relatives’ names and the dates of their flights, deportations and murders.

Friedländer found refuge in the US but returned to live in Germany in 2010 at the age of 88, after the death of her husband, calling it her “fourth life”.

“Many people didn’t understand,” she said. “‘How can you return to the perpetrators?’ 

“I told them: ‘I’m not going to the perpetrators, I’m going back to talk to the third and fourth generations.’”

Friedländer said the rise in antisemitism was not a surprise to her. “What is happening now reminds me exactly of how it started back then. I’m just disappointed and sad,” she said.