The Blogs: Can Jews Live Freely in Berlin?

After Berlin’s election, Governing Mayor Kai Wegner warns that the Left poses a security risk. But the deeper question is whether the city’s next government can protect Jewish Berliners’ right to live visibly, openly and without fear.

If you live in New York, Tel Aviv or London, you have probably heard wonderful things about Berlin. You may have come for the museums, stayed out later than you intended and understood, somewhere between dinner and the journey home, why people move here.

Berlin offers the appealing possibility of being left alone to live as you please. There is room for eccentricity, reinvention and a life that would attract uncomfortable attention somewhere else. For a city so burdened by its history, it can feel remarkably unburdened in the present.

That freedom becomes harder to describe when someone has to decide whether to tuck a Star of David beneath a shirt.

RIAS Berlin, an organization that documents antisemitism, reports that Jewish and Israeli residents weigh whether to wear Jewish symbols or speak Hebrew in public. Some have concluded that concealing those parts of their identity is safer than displaying them openly. An ordinary encounter can become threatening once someone recognizes, or assumes, that they are Jewish or Israeli.

This is the Berlin whose future is now being negotiated.

In written answers to questions for this article, provided through his press office, Governing Mayor Kai Wegner delivered a blunt warning about the party seeking to replace his administration.

“The Left Party is a security risk for Berlin and for our country,” he said.

Wegner accused parts of the Berlin party of antisemitism and of inciting hostility toward the police and security authorities. He said he shared the concerns of Jewish organizations and the Israeli ambassador about its possible participation in government.

The warning comes from the politician who currently leads the city’s government. It also comes from a political opponent whose party has just suffered an electoral defeat.

Die Linke, the Left Party, won 25.7 percent of the vote on September 20, ahead of Wegner’s Christian Democrats at 18.8 percent, according to the provisional official result.

Berlin is both Germany’s capital and one of its federal states. Its governing mayor therefore has responsibilities closer to those of a mayor and a state governor combined. The government formed after this election will oversee the police, schools and other institutions on which Jewish residents depend for protection.

On October 1, representatives of Die Linke, the Greens and the Social Democrats met for approximately five hours to discuss antisemitism, racism and organized crime ahead of possible formal exploratory talks. They described their exchange as constructive and agreed to continue discussions, without publicly announcing an agreement. No new coalition has been formed.

The reservations extend into the parties considering governing together. Martin Hikel, the Social Democratic mayor of Berlin’s Neukölln district, called for an SPD membership vote before coalition negotiations and argued that a party tolerating antisemitic incidents could not be a coalition partner. His demand reflects a dispute within the SPD, rather than an agreed position of its leadership.

Die Linke has been making its own case.

In a September 30 statement, its parliamentary and state leaders promised to protect Jewish institutions and confront antisemitism. They said that where mistakes had been made during the campaign, they must be examined, and that their stages must never provide a platform for calls to violence or statements that frighten Jewish people. They also argued that much of the criticism directed at the party since the election had become indiscriminate and divisive.

There has been a concrete consequence in a separate controversy. On September 30, Left Party lawmaker Ferat Koçak announced that he would relinquish his seat on the federal parliament’s interior committee, which deals with domestic security. The decision followed criticism of his chat exchanges with Firas Remmo, the son of Issa Remmo.

Elif Eralp, the party’s candidate for governing mayor, has made commitments more specific than a general promise of tolerance. Her May 8 plan for Jewish life recognizes the danger faced by people wearing a kippah or Star of David and by those speaking Hebrew. It explicitly identifies police presence as a necessary part of protection arrangements, alongside prevention and community support.

Jewish Berliners should be able to hold her to that commitment. They are also entitled to ask how it fits with the changes her party proposes.

Die Linke’s election program calls for dissolving Berlin’s domestic intelligence agency as an intelligence service and replacing it with an independent institution working without intelligence methods. Its information would come from public sources and academic studies. Elsewhere, the program seeks to redirect spending from what it describes as further police armament toward social services and review police staffing against that of other city-states, allowing for Berlin’s additional responsibilities as the capital. It also promises support for antisemitism prevention, monitoring and assistance to victims.

A government must be able to identify threats that their perpetrators are trying to conceal. Before changing the institutions responsible, a prospective coalition should explain which capabilities it intends to retain, who will exercise them and how continuity will be secured.

The politicians proposing those changes owe clear answers above all to the Jewish residents who are being asked to trust that their security will not diminish in the process.

Wegner, meanwhile, owes the city more than a warning about his opponents.

Asked which measures had made Jewish life demonstrably safer, Wegner pointed to increased protection for Jewish institutions after the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, a ban on displaying Hamas symbols at Berlin schools and two changes to Berlin’s police law that expanded police powers. He also said the Israeli flag had flown outside the Red City Hall until the last hostage returned to Israel.

Wegner identified two further measures he had wanted but had not been able to achieve. One was a constitutional commitment to combating antisemitism.

“I would have liked to enshrine the fight against antisemitism as a state objective in the state constitution — but that could not be achieved in the coalition with the SPD,” he wrote, referring to the Social Democrats.

He also said he had wanted to tighten Berlin’s assembly law to make it easier for the authorities and police to prohibit demonstrations from which violence emanates.

His answer did not explain the negotiations behind the failed constitutional change or describe the SPD’s objections. Nor did he provide data or other evidence showing how the measures he listed had measurably changed the safety of Jewish residents. He also did not identify the three binding measures for the next Senate or the concrete benchmarks for the coming legislative term that he had been asked to provide.

Asked about his responsibility for the election result and a decision he would make differently, Wegner described economic pressures affecting the campaign and defended his administration’s achievements. He did not identify a decision he would make differently. Asked to substantiate his criticism of Die Linke with particular people, positions or incidents, he offered no specific examples in his written answer.

His certainty about the danger posed by a future government deserves to be accompanied by a more searching assessment of his own.

The sharp increase in documented antisemitic incidents after October 7, 2023, occurred during Wegner’s administration.

RIAS documented 2,197 antisemitic incidents in Berlin in 2025, including 39 attacks and a separate case of extreme violence. The total declined from 2,521 in 2024. It nevertheless remained far above the annual average of fewer than 1,000 recorded between 2018 and 2022. The organization also documented 239 gatherings at which antisemitic incidents occurred. Those findings do not establish that every participant at those gatherings was antisemitic. They show how persistently antisemitism appeared in public life.

A lower annual total offers little reassurance to someone deciding whether a necklace is safe to wear.

No one should presume to tell Jewish Berliners how safe they ought to feel, or require them to explain their fear convincingly before it is taken seriously.

Jewish Berliners should never be required to explain, defend or renounce Israel in order to be accepted as full members of this city. They may support Israel, criticize its government, disagree among themselves or refuse the conversation altogether. Their right to belong in Berlin cannot be conditional on a political declaration.

Jewish people in Berlin are not representatives of the Israeli government, and they must never be held collectively responsible for its actions. Criticism of Israel, however strongly expressed, cannot become a license to intimidate Jews, assign them collective guilt or make them afraid to identify themselves as Jewish. No political cause can justify the celebration of attacks on civilians. A disagreement with Israel is one thing. Turning that disagreement against a Jewish neighbor is another.

The next government should be judged in places where its promises become tangible: at the entrance to a school, in the response to a reported threat, in the handling of harassment at a university and in the resources available to protect a congregation.

Eralp’s promise that police protection remains necessary should be reflected in staffing and funding. Any intelligence reform should account for the capabilities that would be lost and how threats would still be detected. A party’s undertaking to confront antisemitism should apply when the offender is useful to it, popular within it or speaking from its own stage.

Wegner’s warning deserves scrutiny. Eralp’s assurances deserve scrutiny. Jewish Berliners deserve the results.

The freedom Berlin advertises is attractive because it sounds so ordinary: come here, make a home, live your life. A Jewish resident should be able to accept that invitation without first deciding how much of themselves to conceal.

A city cannot prove its commitment to Jewish life solely by mourning the Jews who were persecuted, deported and murdered under Nazi rule. Berlin has learned how to remember Jewish absence. Its next government must prove that it can protect Jewish presence.

Wegner’s quotations were translated from German.