But a short drive away, in the Jewish community centre of Munich, which is guarded by armed police, acting president of the Jewish Community Charlotte Knobloch tells me how worried she is about spiralling modern-day antisemitism.
Born in the early 1930s, Ms Knobloch remembers holding her father’s hand and watching Jewish shop windows smashed and synagogues in flames on Kristallnacht, the Night of the Broken Glass in November 1938, when the Nazi regime carried out mass acts of violence against Jews and their property, while most non-Jewish Germans either cheered or looked the other way.
She says antisemitism never disappeared entirely after the war, but she hadn’t believed things would become as worrying again as they are now. Even in Germany, she says, which historically has done much to confront its Nazi past and to be vigilant against antisemitism.
It’s an assertion supported anecdotally by members of the Jewish community in Germany and elsewhere who say they now fear wearing a Star of David in public and prefer not to have a Jewish newspaper delivered to their homes, for fear of being labelled “a Jew” by their neighbours.
Studies by the Community Security Trust in the UK and the EU’s Fundamental Rights Agency tell the same story. The FRA says 96% of Jews interviewed across 13 European countries report experiencing antisemitism in everyday life.
Jewish communities in South America note a significant uptick in antisemitism too, while in Canada, a synagogue was firebombed a few weeks ago and there was a shooting incident at a Jewish school. In the US last summer, Jewish graves were desecrated in the city of Cincinnati.
Former President Joe Biden identified global antisemitism as a foreign policy concern. Academic Deborah Lipstadt, who was his special envoy for monitoring and combating it, highlights antisemitism online – often along with Islamophobia and other forms of discrimination – which she says are manipulated by outside actors like Russia, Iran and China to sow division in society and to further their own goals and messaging.
She also speaks of a global rise in antisemitism following Israel’s military response in Gaza which has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians – after the Hamas-led massacre of 1,200 people inside Israel on 7 October 2023.
