Anti-Semitic hoodlums attacked Berlin's Chabad Rabbi Yehuda Teichtal and eight of his students on Saturday night, a week before the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht. On that day in 1938, Nazis led a brutal attack on German Jewish synagogues and businesses.
Two men in a Mercedes Benz rammed into the rabbi's car in reverse, after having passed it just before. The attackers yelled anti-Semitic insults and then hurled an unknown object at the victims, who managed to write down the license number of the hoodlums before they fled. No serious injuries were reported.
Violent hate crimes in Germany soared 9 percent last year, and government officials reported another significant increase in the first half of 2008. Last year, vandals threw a smoke bomb through a window of the Chabad pre-school facility and then sprayed anti-Semitic graffiti on the building's walls.
The Rabbinical Centre of Europe (RCE), stated it was "totally shocked" at the attack in what it said is a country "that should have been dispersing messages of tolerance to all European countries," European Jewish Press reported.
"We maintain that Berlin must put an end to nationalistic and neo-Nazi organizations within its boundaries, otherwise, we have no guarantee that history will not repeat itself,” the Brussels-based centre group stated.
The remaining witnesses of Kristallnacht have begun speaking at various events towards the anniversary of the pogrom that preceded the beginning of the Holocaust.
Dr. Paul Oestreicher wrote in the London Guardian that German officers "let loose an orgy of destruction... The synagogues were set ablaze. Jewish shops were smashed up and pillaged. Jewish men were rounded up, beaten up, some to death, many sent to concentration camps.
"Jack-booted men wielding wooden clubs ran up and down the street and began to smash the windows of the Jewish-owned department stores."