A protestor outside the Documenta art festival in Germany holds a sign reading “Where Israel is boycotted, Jews are boycotted.” Photo: Reuters/Boris Roessler/dpa

A new report collating antisemitic outrages in Germany during 2022 was published on Tuesday, giving a total of nearly 2,500 incidents over the year, with a worrying increase in cases of extreme violence registered.

The report — published by RIAS, a government-funded watchdog that monitors antisemitism in 11 of Germany’s 16 states — disclosed there were 2,480 antisemitic incidents, an average of just under seven per day.

The slight decrease in the number of incidents compared with 2021 — when RIAS reported a total of 2,738 offenses — was explained through the squeeze on “opportunity structures” to promote hatred of Jews, the federal government’s chief official dealing with antisemitism, Felix Klein, observed on Tuesday. For example, demonstrations against COVID-19 protocols, often laced with antisemitic conspiracy theories, were widespread during 2021 but almost disappeared during 2022 as the pandemic came under control. 2021 also witnessed a brief war in May between Israel and the Hamas terrorist group in Gaza which resulted in a flurry of antisemitic demonstrations in Germany and around the world.

“The lack of exactly these structures does not make people who think in antisemitic terms critical of antisemitism,” Klein said in an interview with the Stuttgarter Zeitung news outlet. “On the contrary: they find new opportunities for their hatred of Jews.”

Nine of the incidents recorded by RIAS involved extreme violence, the organization’s research officer, Bianca Loy, noted, among them shots fired at a former rabbi’s house adjacent to a Jewish cemetery in the city of  Essen. “This is the highest number of such cases since nationwide reporting began in 2017,” she said.

A further three incidents were tied to suspects allegedly operating on behalf of the Iranian regime’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). In response, RIAS board member Benjamin Steinitz called on the German authorities to step up their fight against Iran’s “state-backed terrorism.”

Klein additionally highlighted how Germany’s cultural environment has frequently enabled expressions of antisemitism, citing as examples the Documenta festival of contemporary art, which featured several blatantly antisemitic works, and the concert tour of Germany last month by Roger Waters, the former Pink Floyd frontman and vocal anti-Zionist activist.

The RIAS report largely tallies with an earlier assessment by the Federal Criminal Police Office, which registered a total number of 2,639 offenses in 2022, and which also noted a significant upswing in violent acts targeting Jews. However, experts, among them Klein, believe that the true number of incidents is much higher, but are not recorded because of reluctance on the part of the victims.

“Only 20 percent of the antisemitic crimes are reported, so the real number should be five times what we have — 25 incidents per day,” Klein told The Algemeiner in a recent interview.