Alarm After Anti-Semitic Attack

Representatives from the Gan-Israel Jewish Nursery School in Berlin have invited Germans to join Jewish leaders in prayer for "tolerance and solidarity" on Thursday. The call came after unidentified assailants sprayed swastikas and other Nazi symbols on the school walls and threw a smoke flare into the building at the weekend.

"The attempt to burn down and lay waste to a Jewish nursery school is a dangerous escalation of intolerance and right-wing radicalism," the school in the western district of Charlottenburg said in a statement. "This attack was not only aimed at Jews, but against everyone who cherishes freedom and democracy."

Gideon Joffe, the head of the Jewish community in Berlin, said the attack was connected to growing anti-Semitism in Germany. Less and less members of the community were willing to openly live out their religion out of fear, he said.

"I have determined greater public acceptance and also trivialization of anti-Semitic ideas in comparison to previous years," Joffe said.

Stephan Kramer, general secretary of Germany's Central Council of Jews, said the Jewish community would have to reckon with such attacks in the future, too.

"People appear to be losing their inhibitions," Kramer said. "Today, their target was a children's facility. What is going to happen next?"

School will get greater protection

Kramer and Joffe are expected to attend Thursday's prayers, which will take place at the synagogue in Wilmersdorf. The school said the prayers were intended to show "that we will not give in to a threat, but will continue to practice Judaism with pride in Berlin."

Rabbi Yehuda Teichtal appeared stunned by the swastikas smeared on the school building.

"This incident makes me very, very sad," Teichtal said. "It causes me great pain to have to see this here."

Berlin's interior senator Ehrhart Körting called the attack "a cowardly act" and said the fact a nursery school was targeted showed "the particular viciousness of the perpetrators."

Körting said the police would now be guarding the school more intensely. The nursery school was only temporarily housed in the villa on Spandauer Damm and therefore not protected as closely as Jewish institutions usually are in Germany.

Police have no leads on the culprits

Criminal investigators called to the scene said the smoke flare failed to explode. It could have caused serious damage or set the building on fire, they said. No one was injured.

There was still no trace of the perpetrators, investigators said. A police spokesman said despite a public appeal to possible witnesses of the attack, not one single tip-off had come in.

German authorities registered more than 12,000 far-right crimes, including 726 acts of violence, in the first eight months of 2006, marking a 20 percent rise on the same period the previous year.