German teens join anti-semitism fight

Filling void as Holocaust survivor numbers shrink

LUCKAU, Germany — Sophie Steiert opens a bag of kosher gummy bears and offers them to 20 other German teenagers in their high school classroom.

“They’re really yummy,” Steiert, 16, says. “And by the way, does any one of you know what kosher means?”

The students shrug. Most of the 17-year-olds never have met a Jewish person. In school, they’ve only talked about the 6 million Jews killed by the Nazis.

For years, the Jewish community in Germany relied on Holocaust survivors to be its ambassadors. But with the number of survivors dwindling and schoolchildren at least three generations removed from the Nazis, young Jews like Steiert take a modern approach with an old message.

They have been encouraged as volunteers for a school outreach program to focus on Jewish life in Germany today. The program was launched amid fresh concerns about anti-semitism in schools and on the streets of German cities.

Germany’s leading Jewish group, the Central Council of Jews, started the peer-to-peer education project last year. Both the program and the 90 Jewish teenagers recruited for it so far are called “likratinos,” which is based on the Hebrew word “likrat” and loosely translates as “moving toward each other.”

While anti-semitism has existed in Europe for hundreds of years, often fanned by Christian churches that blamed Jews for the killing of Jesus, a large influx of immigrants from Mideast countries into Germany has provided new sources of tension, such as the Israeli-palestinian conflict, according to German officials and Jewish activists.

The German Interior Ministry said in its annual crime statistics survey that police received reports of 1,453 anti-semitic incidents in 2017 — four per day.

The visible reappearance in Germany of the prejudice that resulted in genocide has aroused alarm. Wenzel Michalski, the Germany director of Human Rights Watch, said his son was harassed so much for being Jewish at a public high school in Berlin that he moved the teen to a private school.

“Anti-semitism has crept back into everyday life, and it’s shocking how much lethargy there is about this,” Michalski said.

Markus Schreiber The Associated Press Jewish teenager Sophie Steiert, right, shows a picture of Jewish daily life on a tablet computer as Laura Schulmann watches June 25 during a lesson as part of a project about religions at the Bohnstedt Gymnasium high school in...