Police officers at the scene of an arson attack against a synagogue in Berlin, Germany. Photo: Reuters/Tobias Schlie

German police are investigating an arson attack in the early hours of Wednesday morning on a Jewish communal building in Berlin that houses a school, a synagogue, and a daycare center.

Communal officials and police officers confirmed that the attack occurred at 3.45 am. No damage was reported as, according to police, the two Molotov cocktails thrown by the assailants missed their target, landing on the sidewalk where a blaze broke out before being extinguished. Police officers were on guard at the entrance to the building on Brunnenstrasse in the Berlin-Mitte section of the German capital, but failed to apprehend the assailants, who fled on foot. The building contains the synagogue of the Kahal Adass Jisroel Association, a Talmud Torah school, and a daycare center.

Hours later, at 8 am, while police officers were investigating the arson, a 30-year-old man drove up on a scooter yelling antisemitic and anti-Israel slogans. After a struggle, police briefly detained the man, releasing him after an ID check, the Tagesspiegel news outlet reported.

Shlomo Rotman, a rabbi from Jerusalem who was attending a seminar at the building on Tuesday, said that he had spotted a man filming the building. Rotman added that he had called the police, who told him that filming was not prohibited.

“I’m shocked,” Rottman told Tagesspiegel. “I came from the war in Israel and thought I would be safe in Germany. Now I feel more unsafe here than in Israel.”

Gideon Joffe, the chair of the Jewish community in Berlin, noted that while security around communal buildings had been boosted, “Jews in our city no longer feel safe.”

“The anti-Jewish violence on the streets of Berlin has reached a new dimension with the arson attack; the rise in Islamist violence is frightening,” Joffe said. “Eighty-five years after Kristallnacht, synagogues in Germany’s capital are set to burn again. It is now up to civil society to show solidarity with the Jewish community.”

A statement from the Central Council of German Jews noted that the arson attack took place after an “Islamist mob” gathered at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate to protest the bombing of the Al Ahli Hospital in Gaza on Tuesday, which Israel attributed to a rocket misfired by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist organization.

“We are all shocked by this terrorist attack,” the council stated. “Above all, the families around the synagogue are shocked and unsettled. Words become actions. Hamas’ ideology of annihilation against everything Jewish also works in Germany. The ‘Day of Wrath’ is not just a phrase. It is psychological terror that results in concrete attacks.”

The attack was condemned by both German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

Speaking in Cairo following his solidarity visit to Israel on Tuesday, Scholz said that Germany “will never tolerate attacks being carried out against Jewish institutions.”

“The police must do their part to protect the Jewish institutions. And we will do that and strengthen everything,” Scholz added.