On a Berlin street where Jewish institutions resemble fortresses, Rabbi Yehuda Teichtal caters to a vibrant community despite growing threats from both the left and the right.
“There’s a lot of concern about the extremists on all sides, especially after Oct. 7, but Berlin had more than 100 communal sukkot,” Teichtal, a community rabbi and head of Chabad Berlin, told JNS this week, referring to the temporary huts Jews traditionally build for the weeklong festival of Sukkot.
One form of extremism in Berlin is on the far left. Buoyed by Muslim votes, Die Linke last month won Berlin’s state parliamentary election for the first time, amid frequent anti-Israel agitation by its supporters and some representatives, which critics say has veered into antisemitism.
Another is on the right, in the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, whose leaders have promoted greater acceptance of Nazi Germany’s past. It came third in the Berlin elections and finished first in two other state elections last month.
“Many members of the Jewish community are more cautious, on edge even, following antisemitic attacks. Many worry about the political atmosphere,” said Teichtal. Security forces maintain a high-level deployment around Jewish institutions, he added, “but that only partly relieves the fears ‘cause no amount of protection is absolute.”
The surges of the far-right and far-left, which both have violent antisemitic fringes, underline a polarization occurring across Western democracies that, like Germany, are facing immigration and energy crises. But in Germany, both extremes echo dark periods from the country’s recent past: Nazism on the right, and Communist repression on the left.
In the balance hangs the fate of Europe’s third-largest Jewish population, of about 100,000 Jews throughout Germany.
Gains at both extremes
Shai Hoffmann, a prominent German-Jewish left-wing activist, acknowledges hostility toward Israel among some local Die Linke members. He described its Neukölln district branch as “very hostile against Israel,” adding that “sometimes it could also be read as antisemitism.” He stressed that he was observing the branch from afar and that some members at the district level were contributing to an atmosphere in which Jews feel unsafe.
Sidelining either political extreme has become harder following recent gains made by Die Linke and AfD.
Critics of AfD say the party has failed to confront antisemitism in its ranks or the glorification of Nazism. The party doubled its vote share to 20.8% in Germany’s 2025 federal election, then won last month’s state elections in Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern with 43.8% and 38.2%, respectively, up from 20.8% and 16.7% in 2021. In North Rhine-Westphalia’s 2025 municipal elections, its share rose from 5.1% to 14.5%.
Die Linke, which has had a string of incidents involving vitriol against Israel that critics said constituted antisemitism, won Berlin’s state election last month with 25.7%, more than doubling its 2023 share of 12.2%. That followed Die Linke’s recovery in Germany’s 2025 federal election, when it rose from 4.9% to 8.8%.
Josef Schuster, the president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, called on left-wing parties in Berlin not to form a coalition with Die Linke, which he said “allows Jew-hatred to flourish.”
Chancellor Friedrich Merz appeared to agree, Jüdische Allgemeine reported after the Sept. 20 elections in Berlin. “Not only in Berlin, but especially in Berlin, there has been a rise in radical and unabashed antisemitism for several months now, which is even being met with applause,” Merz said in a statement following the Berlin elections.
“I very much hope that the SPD in particular, but also the Greens, will give a very clear response here, especially here in Berlin,” Merz said, referencing the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and the Green Party. “The fact that Jewish life is no longer safe in Germany is the heaviest burden of recent years.”
It was a rare admission of failure by the leader of a country where the pledge to “never again” lapse into racial hatred has served as a major imperative of mainstream post-Nazi politics and society.
The 2019 armed attack by a far-right extremist on a synagogue in Halle focused international attention on the threat posed by neo-Nazis in Germany. Jewish community leaders now warn that antisemitism on the far left, including in Die Linke, also threatens Jewish life.
Last year, the Berlin branch of Die Linke’s youth organization claimed in a resolution that a “destruction of the Palestinian people by the Israeli state” was underway. Israel had a “colonial and racist character […] from its beginnings […] expressed in the conquest of new territories and the expulsion of their inhabitants,” according to the resolution. It accused Israel of “apartheid” and “genocide in Gaza.”
At a performance in August during a Die Linke campaign event featuring the rapper Dahabflex in Berlin’s Neukölln district, he chanted: “Yallah, yallah, intifada” and “Death to the IDF.”
Israeli Ambassador to Germany Ron Prosor warned, “The strong showing of Die Linke Party in the Berlin election should worry everyone who cares about the continued existence of Jewish life in this city.”
Last month, Prosor urged Germans to recognize left-wing antisemitism alongside the far right’s widely condemned antisemitism problem. “Germany looks to the right. It must not be blind in its left eye,” Prosor wrote on X.
Antisemitism reaches record high
Statistics show that Israel-related antisemitism, which is primarily a left-wing issue in Europe, is rising. In June, the Berlin-based Federal Association of Departments for Research and Information on Antisemitism (RIAS) said that the number of antisemitic incidents documented in Germany in 2025 rose slightly from the previous year to a record 8,725.
Israel-related antisemitism accounted for 68% of all incidents, which included 178 assaults and 257 cases involving threats. The 2022 tally stood at 2,480 incidents, but expressions of antisemitism have skyrocketed after the Oct. 7, 2023 attack by Hamas on Israel, which triggered a regional war.
The war seems to have had limited effect on the far right’s steady stream of historical revisionism—AfD leader Alice Weidel in 2025 called Adolf Hitler a communist—and the anti-Jewish hostility of some of its supporters.
One of them is believed to have written last month a death threat against Holocaust survivor Charlotte Knobloch, from Munich. The death threat reportedly noted her vocal opposition to AfD.
On the far left, however, the war has mainstreamed hate speech that for decades had been verboten in Germany, and which often bleeds into antisemitism, according to Anetta Kahane, a prominent German-Jewish journalist, anti-racism activist and former politician in East Germany.
Kahane founded the Amadeu Antonio Foundation against racism. A former communist, she had served for several years as an informant to the East German Stasi spy agency.
“In East Germany, the government but also the population was always very antisemitic, especially when it came to Israel. These two elements were never discussed,” she said. Germany’s Jewish community “can only survive in its current form if both the far right and the far left are kept out of power,” said Kahane, who lives in Berlin.
“Sometimes I go downstairs to look at them,” Kahane added, referencing activists who regularly gather at a street crossing near her home, at times for anti-Israel rallies and at other times for right-wing rallies.
“They shout their irrational slogans, full of hate, as the hipsters sip their coffees at their chic cafes. That’s the situation.”
Berlin state chairwoman of Die Linke Kerstin Wolter told dpa she rejected accusations of antisemitism leveled against her party, which she said supported “Israel’s right to exist and the protection of Jewish life.”
Stephan Protschka, state chairman of the AfD’s Bavaria chapter, told JNS: “I condemn the death threat against Charlotte Knobloch unequivocally and without reservation.” He, too, denied claims that AfD was institutionally antisemitic.
Kahane traced the far right’s gains to an ideological stream in Germany that she said had only been suppressed but never addressed. It was especially prevalent in East Germany immediately following reunification, after that Soviet puppet state collapsed in 1990, she said.
The German government of the day failed to confront neo-Nazi groups forcefully, hoping that reunification would defang them, she said, arguing that “this was a mistake.”
The arrival of millions of immigrants from the Middle East into Germany, especially in a wave that began in 2014, “triggered” far-right agitation, Kahane added.
Meanwhile, the far left has begun pandering to new Muslim populations, which studies show have elevated levels of antisemitism compared to non-Muslims in Germany. One 2025 study found antisemitic statements had a 35% endorsement among Muslims in Germany, compared to 7% among Christians.
“You see pro-ayatollah symbols. Hamas, Hezbollah flags. And you have a lot of Turkish people joining them with Turkish flags and pictures of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. It’s a strange alliance where hatred of Jews is a common thread,” Kahane told JNS.
A dangerous feedback loop
Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, the president of the Munich-based Conference of European Rabbis, described the political dynamic in Germany as a feedback loop, fueled by countries, which he declined to name, hostile to the European Union.
“Antisemitism is only a tool for people seeking to destabilize the E.U. by strengthening terrorist activities, radical Islam in Europe,” he said, adding that the far left was too vulnerable and sometimes even amenable to these influences.
The far right’s rise is a “counter-reaction” aided by “countries interested in destabilizing the unity of Europe,” he said.
The Delfi news site in May reported that Russia had orchestrated antisemitic and anti-Muslim incidents in Paris—including vandalizing synagogues—to inflame divisions and undermine French President Emmanuel Macron.
Separately, the U.S. Justice Department announced in May an eight-count indictment against an Iraqi-Iranian national accused of directing terrorist attacks, including plots targeting Jewish sites in New York and London.
Can the center hold?
Will Germans manage to keep the political extremes out of power, as Jewish community leaders warn that their rise threatens Jewish life in the country?
For the time being, Kahane believes the German center will hold.
“There are enough people who are against the far right, and somehow enough conservatives who are against the far left,” she said. “But how long this lasts, we can only guess.”
Hoffmann, meanwhile, warns that attention to Die Linke’s gains must not obscure AfD’s strength in the capital. Its third-place finish in Berlin, he argues, also belongs in the discussion of threats to Jewish life.
“This is what we don’t speak about at all,” he said.
