Eralp was not available after the party meeting, and her party’s co-chair, Ines Schwerdtner, declined an interview.

“Leave this country”

Michael Wolffsohn has grim advice for Jewish Berliners. The prominent historian and conservative commentator was born in Tel Aviv to a family of Jewish merchants from Berlin, who fled the Nazis for Palestine in 1939. As a boy, he came back with his parents to West Berlin. 

In the magazine Cicero, Wolffsohn, 79, said what he would tell a young Jewish Berliner who asks whether to stay: with a heavy heart, “Leave this city and this country.” He himself, he added, was too old to uproot. Were he younger, he, too, would leave.

It is not hard to see why Berlin’s estimated 20,000 to 40,000 Jews are on edge. In the five years before the 2023 Hamas attack in Israel and the resulting war in Gaza, RIAS Berlin, a watchdog that tracks antisemitic incidents in the city whether or not they are crimes, logged just under 1,000 a year. Last year it counted 2,197. The police recorded an even steeper increase in crimes classified as antisemitic: from 381 in 2022 to 2,268 in 2025.

RIAS follows the definition of antisemitism laid out by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, counting conduct ranging from insults and graffiti to statements at demonstrations. It says it did not simply count criticism of Israel’s conduct in Gaza or of the Israeli military as antisemitic, but did so when the situation in Gaza was used to disparage Jews collectively, justify violence against them or trivialize the Holocaust.

Some incidents were violent. RIAS recorded 39 physical attacks in Berlin last year, 16 of them in Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg. RIAS says multiple people who reported antisemitic incidents described becoming more cautious in daily life, including no longer openly wearing Jewish symbols after repeated harassment.