A Terrorist Attack on Yom Kippur in Halle, Germany
Ezra Waxman likes being Jewish in Europe.
There is an opportunity, he says, to lay the roots of a new, living Jewish culture. Originally from Boston, he moved to Berlin two months ago, for a postdoc position in mathematics at the Technical University of Dresden. He’d been invited, along with a dozen or so other young Jewish expats, to spend Yom Kippur in Halle, a small city about a hundred miles from the capital. Halle’s prewar Jewish population was around thirteen hundred; by 1944, around ninety remained. Today, most of the Jewish community in Halle came to Germany from the collapsing Soviet Union, as part of a refugee program called Kontingentflüchtlingsgesetz. Waxman, who is thirty-one, earnest, and gently provocative, had been excited to share with them the singing and dancing that he’d grown up with in the U.S. “Even just knowing the songs helps create a choir and gives a lot more power to the service,” Waxman said. “It raises the bar of the religious experience.”
This past Wednesday, fifty or so older, Russian-speaking Jews and ten young Americans, a few Germans, a Pole, an Austrian, and a Brit had gathered in the synagogue, rebuilt after the war in the pseudo-Moorish style, its sceptre-like domes rising from behind a brick wall, the men in the front of the mid-century sanctuary and the women in the back. During the Torah reading, there was a loud boom, like a big metal object falling over. The synagogue had requested a police presence during the holiday, but the German government had turned it down. Instead, the security system had been somewhat cobbled together. A member of the community, who wore a jacket that said “Security” and sat at a small desk near the entrance to the sanctuary, had been designated the security guard by the leadership of the synagogue. The cantor paused the service, and people crowded around a security-camera monitor. A man dressed in black was on the sidewalk outside the wooden door, which had been locked during the services as a security measure. He was surrounded by smoke; less than a minute later, there was another boom, and then a sound that Waxman immediately recognized as gunfire.
The weapons allegedly used by the twenty-seven-year-old Stephan Balliet, from the town of Benndorf, about twenty-five miles from Halle, were hand-fashioned from wood, piping, steel, and plastic. In an online post prepared in advance, obviously expecting someone to go looking for it, he included photos of his handiwork, which he had modelled after open sources on the Internet. Last Wednesday, they malfunctioned accordingly, as he tried, and failed, to push open the door to the synagogue’s grounds, and then tried, still unsuccessfully, to shoot it open. It seems clear that if Balliet had been able to purchase weapons—if the scenario had happened in America—there would have been a massacre. (“God bless the Germans with their gun-control laws,” Waxman said.) Balliet, who was taken to an undisclosed hospital after suffering injuries during a shootout with police, live-streamed his rampage, apparently imitating the terrorist who broadcast on Facebook Live the murder of fifty-one people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. Nine minutes into Balliet’s video, a woman passing by in the street shouts at him, and he guns her down. Finding himself still unable to gain entry to the synagogue, swearing and frustrated, he drives down to the end of the street and enters a Turkish döner shop, where he kills one more person.
When news of the attack began to circulate later that day, one could not help but think of everything else that was happening in Germany at the time. Less than a week earlier, a man with a knife had overcome the barrier outside Berlin’s Neue Synagogue, which had miraculously survived the nineteen-forties, before being stopped by armed security guards. (He was later released, in accordance with German law, and charged only with disturbing the peace.) In Dresden, at the moment, one of the largest right-wing-terror trials in Germany in decades is taking place—the defendants are eight members of a neo-Nazi group that calls itself Revolution Chemnitz, who were intercepted last year and arrested for allegedly planning to attack immigrants, political opponents, and journalists. Germany’s Interior Minister has said that, in 2018, the police uncovered a thousand and ninety-one weapons related to far-right terrorism, compared with six hundred and seventy-six in 2017. On Thursday, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the German President, joined the head of the Jewish community in Halle, Max Privorozki, to pay tribute to the victims. Afterward, Steinmeier spoke briefly with journalists and residents who had gathered outside, announcing that the German government would be very clear about its responsibility to protect Jewish life in Germany. (After the attack, however, Waxman told me that he and the other members of the group spent the night in Halle without any visible security presence.)
When someone asked Privorozki how concerned he was about the rise of the extreme right in Germany, he responded that the problem wasn’t just in Germany. “All over the world there is anti-Semitism,” Privorozki said. “It’s very important that governments in all countries find out the special medicine to try to fight this problem.” (Privorozki later told me that he’d received an e-mail of condolence from the Tree of Life Synagogue, in Pittsburgh, where eleven people were killed by a mass shooter almost exactly a year ago.) Florian Hartleb, a lecturer of political science at the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Inglostadt and an expert on right-wing extremism, agreed with Privorozki’s appraisal. “I think it would be misleading to link this too much with the local situation,” Hartleb told me, noting that the terrorist’s words, like those of the Christchurch killer, were largely strung together from Internet-ready memes. “This was not an ideology sui generis,” Hartleb said. “He was socially isolated. There was clearly some personal frustration. He was living with his mother.” More specifically, Balliet’s actions bore signs of an 8chan subculture that promotes what has been referred to as the “gamification” of terrorism. He was one of the so-called alienated children of our times, Hartleb said, who search for a new family in online culture. He was also unknown to police prior to the attack.
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