A Chabad rabbi in Offenbach, Germany, was the victim of a verbal assault on his way to synagogue this past weekend by a group of teenagers.
“They shouted, ‘sh**ty Jew’ and ‘Free Palestine’ and other things at me,” Rabbi Menachem Mendel Gurevitch wrote in a post on his Facebook page.
“Usually, I ignore things like this, but this time I couldn’t, so I decided to try and talk to them. But the more I talked, the more they shouted at me,” he wrote.
This was not the first time Gurevitch has come under attack. Five years ago, he was assaulted by a group of teens who started screaming anti-Semitic slurs at him. After that incident, a group of local residents organized a meeting with the assailants, and they apologized.
Gurevitch mocked the apology, calling it “bla, bla, bla.”
“Offenbach is a good city, but anti-Semitism is becoming normalized and standard. I get ‘compliments’ like these often,” he told the local news site Hessenschau.
“My children don’t want to walk with me if I’m wearing a kippah,” he added, saying that his children hide their own kippahs under hats when they are outside, “because they’re scared.”
The Offenbach incident follows another incident in Berlin over the weekend, when a young Jewish man was attacked and badly beaten by a group of Muslims. The police arrested 10 men, ages 15 to 21, some of whom were Syrian, on suspicion of involvement.