Yesterday evening in Neuenburg, in the municipality of Zetel in the district of Friesland, a severely disabled Jewish man, who is a member of the AfD, was attacked and seriously injured whilst on his way to a party get-together at the Alten Bahnhof pub. The man wears a kippah in public for religious reasons and was therefore recognisable as a Jew. According to Martin Sichert, district chairman of the AfD Friesland-Wittmund and Member of the Bundestag, two young German perpetrators – apparently from the far-left scene – initially insulted the victim, calling him a “son of a bitch” and a “bastard”, threatened him with a knife and knocked him over from behind. They then deliberately punched and kicked the victim in the head and face whilst he was lying on the ground. One of the attackers threatened to kill the victim.
Fearing for his life, the man managed to knock the attacker to the ground, pull himself up and flee to the dentist’s surgery in the former railway station building, whilst the second attacker continued to assault him. A motorist passing by briefly addressed the attackers, but did not offer any help and drove on. The victim reached the surgery, banged on the door and rang the bell. Only then did the attackers let up and flee. He received first aid at the surgery; an ambulance took him to the Accident and Emergency department in Sanderbusch. He is now out of danger. The police are investigating the incident as attempted murder; a complaint has been lodged.
The background to the crime is particularly explosive: the victim had fled from Berlin to Neuenburg in November 2023 because life there as a Jew in public had become unbearable for him. Following Hamas’s attack on Israel, the man had, within the space of a month, experienced constant threats, calls for his extermination, stones being thrown at his house and anti-Semitic slogans daubed on the walls of his home, leading him to regard his life in the capital as being in acute danger. Martin Sichert described it as simply inconceivable that a person who had fled the anti-Semitic stronghold of Berlin should be “exposed to the same violence in our region”. He went on to say: “The cowardly attack by several perpetrators on a severely disabled man, solely because of his religious beliefs, shocks me to the core. I hope that the perpetrators will face the full force of the law for this inhuman act.”