BERLIN: Organisers of a major German music prize scrapped their main award on Wednesday due to an anti-Semitism row, as Germans staged shows of solidarity with Jews after a spate of shocking hate crimes.

A cascade of recent scandals, including the “Echo” prize-winning rap duo making light of Nazi death camp prisoners, has raised pointed questions about Germany’s ability to protect its burgeoning Jewish community seven decades after the Holocaust.

On Tuesday, the head of the country’s Central Council of Jews, Josef Schuster, set off shockwaves with a warning against wearing religious symbols in public for fear of attack.

“We must never allow anti-Semitism to become commonplace in Germany again,” Foreign Minister Heiko Maas told the daily Tagesspiegel ahead of a “Berlin Wears Kippa” event where Jews and non-Jews will wear the traditional skullcap in a shared show of defiance.

Earlier in the day in the eastern city of Erfurt, about 150 people, including Christian and Muslim community representatives and political officials, marched wearing kippas from the city’s medieval Jewish baths to the main local synagogue. Newspapers offered paper cutouts of skullcaps for readers to wear.

The rallies came a week after a 19-year-old Syrian refugee attacked two young men wearing kippas in a trendy district of the capital, shouting “yahudi” — Jew in Arabic — and lashing out at his victim with a belt. A video of the assault, filmed by one of the Israeli victims, went viral on social media and sparked widespread revulsion.

The issue of anti-Semitism is particularly fraught in Germany, which has gone to great lengths to atone for its Nazi past and whose political class takes deep pride in the growth of the now 200,000-strong Jewish community.

However, a number of high-profile incidents in recent months have stoked fears of a possible resurgence of anti-Semitism from both the far-right and a large influx of predominantly Muslim asylum-seekers since 2015.

In March, the Central Council of Jews urged schools to keep track of religious bullying following reports that a young Jewish girl was allegedly harassed and threatened by Muslim fellow pupils at a Berlin primary school.

Published in Dawn, April 26th, 2018