Hundreds residents of the German city of Oldenburg marched on Sunday to express their solidarity with the Jewish community following an arson attack at the local synagogue on Friday.
An unknown perpetrator hurled a Molotov cocktail against the door of the synagogue in this city of northern Germany. No one was injured in the attack as caretakers from a neighboring cultural center were quickly able to extinguish the fire, which damaged the door to the place of worship.
Claire Schaub-Moore, chairwoman of the Jewish community in Oldenburg thanked the residents for their support. “We are deeply impressed by this solidarity. We feel this strength and it is much greater than what happened on our doorstep, on the doorstep of the synagogue,” she said.
Speaking to the crowd, the city’s Mayor Jürgen Krogman called thge attack against the synagogue “nothing other than attempted murder, terror.”
The leader of Lower-Saxony’s parliament, Hanna Naber, an Oldenburg resident herself, told demonstrators, “We are renewing the promise with which the German Federal Republic was founded: Never again!.”
In a post on X German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser called the act a “disgusting, inhumane attack on Oldenburg’s Jewish men and women.”
Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany,said: “We will not be intimidated. Jewish life belongs to our country, to Germany. Those who refuse to accept that fact must bear all legal consequences for their actions.”