A group of youths attacked a rabbi on Sunday evening in Offenbach, a city near Franfurt.
Six to eight “Mediterranean looking” youths attacked the 39-year-old Rabbi Mendel Gurewitz. The youths pushed the rabbi and called him a “shitty Jew.
The Orthodox rabbi filed a police complaint.
Police spokesman Rudi Neu, in southeast Hesse state where Offenbach is located, said a criminal complaint was filed and there was probable cause to investigate for an anti-Semitic hate crime, bodily injury and harassment.
After the initial verbal hostility, Gurewitz photographed the youths with his mobile phone, the police spokesman said. The youths ordered him to delete the photos.
The alleged attack took place in a shopping center passage. The authorities are reviewing video cameras from the shopping area for footage of the event.
Mark Dainow, the deputy director of the Jewish community in Offenbach, criticized the security personnel at the shopping location for failing to intervene to stop the aggressive activity of the youths.
Gurewitz was forced to flee the building and the youths pursued him. A friend of the rabbi drove by and rescued the rabbi by picking him up in his car. The manager of the shopping mall apologized for the conduct of the security personnel.
On May 26, three people attacked a 26-year-old Jewish man in Berlin early in the morning, lightly wounding him. He was wearing a Tshirt with a pro-Israel emblem on it, and the assailants learned that he was Jewish in the course of a conversation.
Also last month, an IDF soldier on leave was among 10 young Israelis who were subjected to an anti-Semitic verbal attack before the May 24 Beyonce concert in Berlin.
The soldier, Nathanel Zerad, told JTA that, standing at the head of the line to enter the O2 World Stadium, the Israelis were verbally attacked by a group of about 50 Germans who wanted to move ahead of them.
“Some of them noticed that we were speaking Hebrew,” Zerad said. “One of them said, ‘You stink, you should go back to Israel.’ A girl said, ‘You guys smell so bad. Why didn’t he die in the Holocaust?’”
