World

Berlin Synagogue Vandalized

October 4, 2000 / 12:43 PM EDT / AP

A Berlin synagogue was vandalized Friday, the second such attack in Germany this week as the country tries to fight a wave of hate crime.

Four stones were thrown at the building, breaking two outer windows of the synagogue in western Berlin's Kreuzberg district but leaving the multicolored stained glass beneath them unharmed.

"These broken windows are a mirror image on German society," Andreas Nachama, head of Berlin's Jewish community, told reporters gathered outside the synagogue, which lies along one of the city's canals. "This situation is alarming."

City officials said authorities were working hard to track down suspects, but there were no immediate leads.

Police discovered the damage around 3 a.m., meaning the attack must have occurred sometime in the previous hour after an earlier patrol passed by.

Authorities are still looking for suspects in a synagogue attack in the western city of Duesseldorf that occurred Monday night, the eve of German Unity Day celebrating 10 years of reunification.

Several Molotov cocktails were thrown at that building, but a passer-by stamped out the flames and no one was injured. The building suffered minimal damage.

The attack in Berlin marks the third synagogue targeted this year in Germany - including a failed arson attack on a synagogue in the eastern city of Erfurt in April.

At least three people have been killed this year in hate-motivated murders. Duesseldorf was also the site of a still-unsolved grenade attack in July that injured 10 recent immigrants from the former Soviet Union, at least six of whom were Jewish.

Nachama said that the problem went to the heart of German society, echoing statements made by leading politicians about the recent wave of xenophobic and anti-Semitic crimes.

"This is a question of the future of democracy in Germany, and not of the Jewish community," he said.

This week includes the Jewish religion's most sacred holidays - Rosh Hashana, which started last Friday evening, and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, beginning Sunday evening.

The head of the Jewish community in Germany, Paul Spiegel, said earlier this week that such attacks may cause some to reconsider whether it was right to rebuild the Jewish community here after the Holocaust's devastation.

The Kreuzberg synagogue is one of seven in Berlin. Completed in 1916, it was among the city's largest with room for 2,000.

Most of it was burned Nov. 9, 1938, during the infamous Kristallnacht, or Night of Broken Glass, when Hitler's followers rampaged through Jewish institutions across the country. Today only a side wing that accommodates a few hundred worshippers remains.