A 24-year-old man has been sentenced by a court in Freiburg, Germany, to a six-month suspended sentence after being convicted of a hate crime.
The indictment states that the man entered a gym about a year and a half ago, came up to a 18-year-old boy, mocked him, threw his kippah to the ground and also stepped on it.
The judge convicted him of incitement to hatred and injury and ordered him, in addition to the suspended sentence, to pay the victim a €3,000 fine.
About a month ago, Germany adopted a new amendment to paragraph 46 of the German Criminal Code, which explicitly recognizes anti-Semitism as aggravating circumstances in a criminal offense.
The victim of the incident was Samuel Kantrovich. He said that a man he did not recognize came to him from behind, knocked his kippah off his head and shouted "Dirty Jew", "Free Palestine" and "Do you want me to hit you? Get out of here, smelly Jew."
The assailant took the kippah that he removed from the head of the young Jewish man, spat into it and threw it in the trash.
Kantrovich said at the time, "The room was full of strong young men and no one intervened. I realized I was alone. Until today I thought it wasn't really dangerous and that I could feel free in Freiburg but I realized that I was wrong and that if something happened to me on the street no one would want to help me.”
Anti-Semitic crimes rose by 20 percent in Germany in 2018, according to interior ministry data which blamed nine out of 10 cases on the extreme right.
Recently released figures found that police registered 2,032 anti-Semitic crimes, including two killings, in 2019, up 13% from 2018 and the highest number of anti-Semitic crimes nationwide since 2001.