Germany: Jewish teachers afraid to reveal their religion to students

Via DW:

(...) The Deutschlandfunk report also featured Jewish teachers from Berlin and elsewhere in Germany saying that they were afraid to reveal their religion to their students. 

"There was a student who told me: 'If I saw a Jew, I'd immediately kill him,'" one teacher from northern Germany told the radio station on the condition of anonymity. "And he meant it." 

The abuse caused one teacher in Berlin to address an angry public letter to Chancellor Angela Merkel and other leaders complaining about anti-Semitism in Berlin's schools. Berlin authorities say they are aware of the problem and acknowledge that the word "Jew" is frequently used as an insult in some of the German capital's schools. 

There was a flurry of interest in the topic in 2015, when the German-Israel Youth Congress was held in Berlin, but the public attention quickly dissipated. Other incidents of anti-Semitism in Berlin schools were reported last year. According to the website report-antisemitism.de, members of the Jewish Forum for Democracy and against Anti-Semitism (JFDA) were called "child murderers" when they visited a school in the heavily Muslim district of Neukölln in May 2016. The JFDA said they had never before experienced such crass anti-Semitism among students. 

There are no official statistics on anti-Semitic incidents specifically in Berlin schools, although the Research and Information Office on Anti-Semitism in Berlin recorded 470 such incidents generally in Berlin last year. Experts say the problem of anti-Semitism in schools stems partly from the conflicts in the Middle East and young people's susceptibility to conspiracy theories. 

"The Middle East conflict is a big concern of these young people, but their knowledge of the issues is very one-sided," Islamism expert Ahmad Monsour told the "Tagesspiegel" in 2015. "It quickly turns into anti-Semitism. It's easy to say the Jews are to blame for everything."

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