Shul was told it faced ‘no threat’

IT WAS in the afternoon during Yom Kippur prayers that Max Privorozki, chair of Halle’s small, traditional Jewish community, heard automatic gunfire coming from the street.

A look at the synagogue’s CCTV system showed a man dressed in military fatigues.

The attacker, Mr Privorozki later recounted, attempted to force his way into the synagogue but failed. He then tried to break open the door to the communiy’s cemetery using machine gun fire and a grenade. Again, he was unsuccessful.

There were dozens of people inside the only synagogue of this small, east German town. The members mostly hail from the former Soviet Union. They were also hosting a number of guests from the United States.

Two people died and two others were hurt in last Wednesday’s attack in Halle; none were from the Jewish community.

But the attack has provoked questions about whether the security provided by federal and state governments in Germany for Jewish communities is adequate.

No police were guarding the building at the time of the attack and it took

the authorities at least ten minutes to arrive after the emergency services were called, Mr Privorozki said.

Stephan Balliet’s attack claimed the life of a middle-aged woman passing by the synagogue who, apparently unaware of what he was doing, admonished him for making too much noise in the street. He shot her in the back.

He then leapt into his car and drove to a nearby kebab restaurant, where he entered and opened fire. One man died as other diners tried to scramble away.

After a gunfight with police, Balliet returned briefly to the synagogue — where his first victim was still lying motionless in the street — before fleeing. He was apprehended several kilometres away less than an hour later.

The events came mere days after an attempted attack on the Neue Synagoge in Berlin, where a 23-year-old Syrian ran at synagogue security personnel with a knife reportedly screaming “Allahu akbar” and “F**k Israel!”

Though police routinely guard synagogues in larger German cities, this was not the case in Halle.

Anastassia Pletoukhina, who was inside the synagogue at the time of the attack, told the Jüdische Allgemeine newspaper that the synagogue had asked for police protection in the past but had been told there was “no acute threat.”

Josef Schuster, head of Germany’s main Jewish organisation, told German television it was “scandalous” that Halle’s synagogue was not under direct police protection on Yom Kippur.

The police’s “negligence has now backfired. It is actually a miracle that there were no further casualties as a result of this attack,” he said.

That the suspect was identified as a right-wing extremist with an antisemitic motive has also spurred reflection on the place of Jew hatred in German society.

The liberal Süddeutsche Zeitung termed the Halle attack “the return of hatred”, a violent demonstration of a disease that Germany has never entirely cured. The Neue Zürcher Zeitung: noted the Halle attack fitted another pattern: that of a lone male, radicalised by a community online, beholden to violent extreme right-wing ideas, partaking in a bloody attack on a minority community.

Many also drew parallels between the attack on a mosque in Christchurch earlier this year and recent assaults on synagogues in Pittsburgh, Poway in California.