Security personnel at the headquarters of Munich’s main Jewish community found a letter on Thursday containing a bullet cartridge and threats, including “All Jews should be shot.”
The security personnel, who routinely check mail and packages sent to the Jewish Community of Munich’s Center, called police immediately upon encountering the envelope with the magazine, the Jüdische Allgemeine Jewish newspaper reported.
The Bavarian State Security Criminal Investigation Department is trying to identify the culprits who posted the envelope, the report said.
“We check every item of mail. In this case, it was immediately apparent that the letter contained problematic content,” Yehoshua Chmiel, vice president of the Jewish Community of Munich, told the Jüdische Allgemeine.
Chmiel described Thursday’s incident as part of an “ongoing escalation,” in which threatening letters are not unusual, though objects like the cartridge are rarely mailed in. The cartridge is disconcerting because it shows the senders “presumably have access to weapons.”
Police are doing their “utmost best,” Chmiel told the Jewish newspaper, but “we feel abandoned.” On a societal level, he said, “There are no actions against antisemitism. There are speeches, but they don’t help us.”
The Jewish Community Center features a synagogue, Ohel Jakob, a Jewish museum and a kosher restaurant.
The CEO of the Munich-based Conference of European Rabbis, Gady Gronich, has said that authorities in Bavaria are relatively vigilant and attentive to the needs of the Jewish community.
The Jewish Community of Munich celebrated its 80th anniversary last week, and the 40th anniversary of Charlotte Knobloch as its president. Knobloch, 93, is a Holocaust survivor and one of Germany’s best-known living Jewish figures. The date was noted during a ceremony that received some coverage in national media.
Germany recorded a historic spike in antisemitic incidents in 2024, with 8,627 cases—the highest annual figure ever documented—marking an 80% increase over the 2023 total, a government watchdog reported in June.
The figure comes from the 2024 report by the Federal Association of Research and Information on Antisemitism, or RIAS, which has tracked such incidents nationally since 2018 and in Berlin since 2015. Its figures for 2025 have not yet been published.
