Jewish Man Attacked in Berlin in Front of His Children, Suspect Arrested

A 48-year-old Jewish man wearing a kippah was threatened and assaulted in Berlin on Saturday afternoon while walking with his two children, according to Berlin police. The attack began around 3:15 p.m. on Uhlandstraße in the Charlottenburg district, where a 31-year-old man reportedly started by shouting insults and threats, then escalated the confrontation into a physical attack.

Police said the suspect spit in the victim’s face and also at the two children standing nearby. Witnesses called police, who arrived at the scene and arrested the suspect. German authorities are now examining whether the incident was motivated by antisemitism. The Bild newspaper reported that the suspect is of Arab origin.

The assault came as Germany published its annual 2025 antisemitism report over the weekend. The report, compiled by the Federal Association of Departments for Research and Information on Antisemitism, RIAS, documented a broad range of incidents classified as antisemitic. Among them was an attack in Hesse, where a rabbi was assaulted in front of his children and had his mobile phone stolen, while the attackers blamed him for Israel’s actions in Gaza.

RIAS said it recorded more than 8,700 antisemitic incidents in 2025, many linked to Israel. The group also cited verbal abuse and death threats directed at Jews online, including one case in which a Jewish woman in Germany received a Facebook image of a canister of Zyklon B, the Nazi gas used to murder Jews in the Holocaust, with the message, “Still in stock.” RIAS, founded in Berlin in 2018 and funded by the German government, now has regional offices in 11 of Germany’s 16 federal states. The report also noted four extreme antisemitic violence cases in 2025, including the February stabbing at Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, where a visitor from Spain was injured and later sentenced in March to 13 years in prison.