Report: Fearing Attacks, Jews in German Town to Stop Wearing Yarmulkes

Attacks and insults on German Jews driven by Muslim youths have together forced a Jewish community to cease wearing the traditional skullcap, according to a local report.

Members of a small Jewish community in the industrial city of Bochum will no longer wear individual kippahs (yarmulkes) because they draw attacks from Muslim youths, they announced earlier this month.

According to the Jerusalem Post, German news outlet Radio Bochum first reported a Jewish community member advising locals to stop wearing kippot in public because they are routinely faced with insults on public streets after being identified as Jews. Bochum is in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, with a population of nearly 365,000 and a Jewish community numbering over 1,000.

“Muslim youths attacked people of the Jewish faith,” read the article cited by the Post in its report. It also carried the warning, “Germans more than any other people in Europe should understand what starts with the Jews never ends with the Jews,” made by Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

This is not the first time concerns for the safety of German Jews have been placed on the public record.

As Breitbart Jerusalem reported, in July the German government was accused of abandoning its Jewish community to sink beneath a surging tide of anti-Semitism that left parts of the country allegedly unsafe for Jews.

Josef Schuster, the president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, made the call. He lamented a lack of action by the German government combined with mass, unfettered immigration from Muslim countries as being key contributors to the plight felt by the nation’s Jewish community.

“In some districts in major cities, I’d advise people not to identify themselves as Jews,” Mr. Schuster said in an interview with the Bild am Sonntag newspaper. “Experience has shown that openly wearing a kippa or a necklace with the Star of David is enough to attract verbal or physical threats.”

He pointed to Muslim immigrants who come from cultures with zero tolerance for Jews as a particular threat.

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