Berlin police arrest suspect in antisemitic attack

German police arrested a 31-year-old Arab man for threatening and spitting on an older Jewish man and the victim’s two children in Berlin on Saturday, the Bild newspaper reported.

The incident happened on Uhland Street in Berlin’s Charlottenburg neighborhood at around 3 p.m., according to the report, which said the victim was wearing a kippah. Passersby called police, who took the suspect into custody on suspicion of perpetrating an antisemitic attack, a State Criminal Police Office spokesperson told the newspaper.

A spokesperson for Israel’s embassy in Berlin wrote on X about the incident: “Just this week, a demand for a kippah ban. A few days later, an attack on a man wearing a kippah and his children right in the center of Berlin. Even children are not spared. Words create an atmosphere. Atmosphere leads to actions.”

The reference to a ban on wearing a kippah was in response to comments made by journalist Khola Maryam Hübsch in an interview aired last week by the ZDF broadcaster. An activist promoting Muslim interests in Germany, she repeated her assertion—which she had aired before in 2018—that if authorities ban Muslim face or head coverings, they should also prohibit Jews from wearing kippahs.

Last week, a government watchdog on antisemitism said that in 2015, it documented the highest-ever number of incidents on record in post-World War II Germany: 8,725, an increase of 98 incidents over the 2024 total. The 2022 tally stood at 2,480 incidents, the Berlin-based Federal Association of Departments for Research and Information on Antisemitism (RIAS) noted in its annual report published last week.

“The number of incidents has remained consistently high since Oct. 7, 2023, and continues to affect the lives of Jewish people,” the report said, adding that “Israel-related antisemitism” accounted for 68% of all incidents.

The 2025 total included 178 assaults and 257 cases involving threats.