A 31-year-old man was arrested Saturday afternoon after allegedly threatening and attacking a 48-year-old Jewish man wearing a kippah in front of his two children in Berlin.
According to Berlin police, the incident began at about 3:15 p.m. as a verbal confrontation and later escalated into a physical assault. During the attack, the suspect allegedly spat in the Jewish man’s face and also toward his two children, who were standing nearby.
The suspect was arrested at the scene.
According to a report in the German newspaper Bild, the suspect is of Arab origin. The victim was walking with his two children on Uhlandstraße in Berlin’s Charlottenburg district when the suspect suddenly began threatening and insulting him.
“This allegedly first led to a verbal confrontation and then to a physical assault,” a police spokesperson said.
Witnesses called police, who arrived at the scene and arrested the suspect. German authorities are now investigating whether the attack was antisemitic in nature.
The incident came as Germany published its annual antisemitism report for 2025 over the weekend, documenting a wide range of incidents classified as antisemitic by the Federal Association of Departments for Research and Information on Antisemitism, known as RIAS.
In one case cited in the report, a rabbi in the western German state of Hesse was attacked in front of his children and had his cellphone stolen. During the verbal assault, the attackers blamed him for Israel’s actions in the Gaza Strip.
RIAS documented more than 8,700 incidents in 2025 classified as antisemitic hostility, many of them linked to Israel.
Among the incidents reported by Jews across Germany were cases of verbal abuse and death threats directed at them on social media. In one case, a Jewish woman received a Facebook message containing an image of a canister of Zyklon B, accompanied by the words: “Still in stock.” Zyklon B was the gas used by the Nazis to murder Jews in extermination camps during the Holocaust.
RIAS, which is funded by the German government, was established in Berlin in 2018 to collect and document antisemitic incidents across the country. It now operates regional offices in 11 of Germany’s 16 federal states.
The organization’s researchers said some Jews in Germany reported continuing to receive antisemitic hate messages even after publicly criticizing Israel’s current government.
In 2025, four cases of extreme antisemitic violence were documented in Germany. One of the most prominent was a stabbing attack in February 2025 at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, where a visitor from Spain was stabbed.
The victim’s life was saved thanks to rapid treatment by an emergency medic. The attacker was sentenced to 13 years in prison in March, and investigators later learned that he had said during questioning that he mistakenly believed the victim was Jewish.