Seeing Ally Against Muslims, Some German Jews Embrace Far Right, to Dismay of Others

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BERLIN — Efforts by Jews to form their own group within a far-right German political party have been met with criticism from the country’s leading Jewish organizations.

The move among members of the group, the Jewish Alternative for Germany, comes amid a spike in anti-Semitic incidents in the country. With some of the attacks coming from Muslims, some Jews have thrown in their lot with the party, known as AfD.

“The AfD is the only party in Germany that focuses on Muslims’ hatred for Jews, without playing it down,” Dimitri Schulz, who is Jewish and joined the organization in 2014, said in a policy statement defining the new group’s purpose.

Many of the country’s traditional Jewish organizations are critical of any alliance with the party. They point to its embrace of nationalist and populist positions and a push by several prominent members to abandon Germany’s culture of remembrance and atonement for its Nazi past.

“We disagree with the notion of a few Jews that it could be in the interest of Jewish people to join the AfD in order to have an influence on their politics,” read a blistering editorial in Jalta, a magazine covering Jewish life in Germany. “On the contrary, we consider membership in such a party to pose a great danger to our security, for Jewish life and migrant life, which are inextricably linked in Germany. We consider this a threat to democracy.”

Earlier this year, Alexander Gauland, a co-leader of the AfD, dismissed the Nazi era as a “speck of bird poop in more than 1,000 years of successful German history.”

And last year, another prominent AfD member questioned Germany’s culpability in World War II and the Holocaust — calling on Germans to make a “180 degree” turn in the way they viewed their history. Germans, he said, were “the only people in the world to plant a monument of shame in the heart of their capital,” referring to the Holocaust memorial in Berlin.

A spokesman for Alternative for Germany said Wednesday that an initial meeting of the new Jewish group might convene on Oct. 7. That would be just weeks before elections are held in Bavaria and Hesse, states where the party is hoping to break into the regional legislatures.

Mr. Schulz is seeking a seat in Hesse, where the party hopes to make inroads in one of the traditional strongholds of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats party. Together with Wolfgang Fuhl, a Jewish party member from the southwestern state of Baden-Württemberg, he is hoping to attract 20 founding members to the group.

Like a majority of the nearly 100,000 Jews who make up the German Jewish community, Mr. Schulz was born in the former Soviet Union. He moved to Germany as a child.

Mr. Schulz called into question the German government’s pledge to uphold Israel’s right to exist and described the AfD as the only party in Germany that still believes in traditional family values.

“All of this contributes to the idea that an alliance of rightist conservatives in Europe is closely associated with Judaism,” he said. He noted a similar recent shift in France, where the far-right National Front party has begun attracting Jews.

On his Facebook page, Mr. Schulz argues for fighting anti-Semitism in sports, and circulates reports of local Jewish clubs reporting an increase anti-Semitic remarks and attacks, especially from recently arrived Muslims seeking asylum in Germany.

The head of Germany’s Central Council of Jews, Josef Schuster, has said that the AfD has been actively seeking to recruit Russian-speaking Jews. Member of the council fear that their warnings about the dangers of far-right populism are having little effect.

“Unfortunately, I have the impression that the AfD’s simple answers are attractive to some people from the former Soviet Union, including Jews,” Mr. Schuster told The Jüdische Allgemeine, a German-language Jewish newspaper.



Source : Nytimes