US Edition 
EU politicians speak out after wave of anti-Semitic attacks
Jewish leaders report a rising tide of racism across Western Europe following Israel's assault on the Gaza Strip
The foreign ministers of Germany, France and Italy have spoken out against a disturbing wave of violent anti-Semitic attacks across Europe in the wake of the Gaza crisis.
In Berlin, police had to step in to protect an Israeli tourist couple at the weekend after protestors turned on them when they spotted the man’s yarmulke. Demonstrators reportedly charged towards the couple shouting “Jew! We’ll get you!”
In Paris, hundreds of protestors have attacked synagogues, smashed the windows of Jewish shops and cafes, and set several alight, including a kosher grocery store which reportedly burned to the ground.
In the Netherlands, the home of the chief rabbi has been attacked with stones twice in one week.
“Anti-Semitic rhetoric and hostility against Jews, attacks on people of Jewish belief and synagogues have no place in our societies,” the German, French and Italian foreign ministers said in a joint statement.
In the west German city of Essen, 14 people have been arrested on suspicion of planning an attack on the city’s Old Synagogue.
There have been reports of protestors in Germany chanting “Jews to the gas chambers”, and police in Berlin have banned protestors from using another popular slogan: “Jew, Jew, cowardly pig, come out and fight alone”.
Police have opened an investigation into the imam of a Berlin mosque after he allegedly called on Muslims to murder Jews in a sermon.
The Israeli ambassador to Germany compared the recent attacks to the plight of Jews in Nazi Germany in the 1930s.
“They pursue the Jews in the streets of Berlin...as if we were in 1938,” Yakov Hadas-Handelsman wrote in a guest piece for Berliner Zeitung newspaper. “And if it continues, I fear that it is only a matter of time before innocent blood will be spilled.”
The protests are attracting an “unholy alliance” of Islamists, neo-Nazis and extreme leftists, the ambassador claimed.
“We would never in our lives have thought it still possible that anti-semitic views of the nastiest and most primitive kind can be chanted on German streets,” said Dieter Graumann, head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany.
The French prime minister, Manuel Valls, condemned the attacks there as “intolerable”.
“To attack a synagogue and a kosher grocery store is quite simply anti-Semitism and racism,” he said.
“They are not screaming ‘Death to the Israelis’ on the streets of Paris. They are screaming ‘Death to the Jews’,” said Roger Cukierman of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France.