The label “Nice people” was stuck on the lid.

Ignatz Bubis had started with an ordinary ring binder in the seventies, at the end of his time in Frankfurt as chairman of the Frankfurt Jewish Community and President of the Central Council of Jews there were dozens.

He kept the hostility in them, which was initially anonymous, then gradually even with real names, was sent to him and his community.

Theresa White

Editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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    Bubis has since died. Shortly before his death in 1999, he said in an interview: “I have achieved almost nothing.” And really, hatred of Jews is still rampant. An example from the recent past: An email was sent to the community in Frankfurt with the most nasty insults and threats, criminally relevant. The police traced the IP address to Kiel, where they found out that a woman had hacked into someone else's Internet connection. She got away with paying 200 euros to the DLRG.

    When Leo Latasch tells this story, he gets angry.

    He is the head of the Jewish community's security department, responsible for dozens of cameras, armored glass windows and his own security staff.

    Devices, glass and people protect the Jews from attacks and are used again and again.

    "It cannot be that the anti-Semitic pig is let out and as good as nothing happens," says Latasch.

    He demands to finish what he calls a cuddle course.

    Like in Bavaria, for example, where there is already half a year in prison for anti-Semitic hostility.

    A list of the derailments

    Do we need that here in Hessen? Is Frankfurt, which the Hessian anti-Semitism commissioner Uwe Becker (CDU) likes to refer to as the most Jewish city in Germany, isn't doing quite well after all? On Thursday eleven young people received their high school diploma at the Jewish school in Frankfurt. You are the first to take your exams at a Jewish school again after the Holocaust. In the year in which 1700 years of Jewish life are celebrated in Germany. So everything is okay, actually?

    A contrast program, the incomplete list of derailments in Frankfurt last month.

    May 15, 2021: Demonstrators at the Nakba demonstration demand the end of the State of Israel.

    May 22, 2021: At a pro-Palestinian rally, Ramazan Kuruyüz, the chairman of the Islamic Religious Community of Hesse, describes the Central Council of Jews in Germany as the mouthpiece of the State of Israel and alleges that it is responsible for “murders”.

    June 7, 2021: A sign at the New Jewish Cemetery in the Nordend district is smeared with a swastika.

    June 11, 2021: The Torah cabinet in the closed prayer room at the airport is smeared with a swastika.

    June 21, 2021: The sign at the cemetery is again smeared with a swastika.

    Hidden anti-Semitism

    Anyone who thinks that a few scribbles are not to be equated with inciting short messages or with agitation at a demo, fails to realize that all of this hostility is deeply anti-Semitic.

    They despise Jews because they are Jews, attack them and their buildings and property because they are Jewish.

    That is terror in its everyday life.

    A graffiti that uses the symbol of the politics of extermination and mass murder is no small graffito, it is not only damage to property, but also a political statement and a mirror of this society.

    And hidden anti-Semitism is fermenting in it.