Chabad Mashgiach Attacked, Spat On in Front of His Children on Berlin Street
A member of Berlin’s Chabad community was assaulted in broad public view over Shabbat, in an attack that left him beaten and his two young children spat on, in what officials are calling the latest sign of a worsening climate for visibly Jewish residents of the German capital.
Rabbi Aviezer Kantor, who serves as a mashgiach — a kosher supervisor — at Berlin’s Chabad House, was walking home from synagogue with his children on Uhland Street in the city’s Charlottenburg district when a 31-year-old man suddenly blocked his path. The man, who spoke Arabic, began cursing and threatening the rabbi without warning.
According to Berlin police, the confrontation did not stay verbal for long. The attacker spat in Rabbi Kantor’s face and in the faces of his two children standing beside him, then turned on the father and beat him — all in front of the children.
The attack might have continued had an Israeli bystander not intervened. Witnessing the assault, the man rushed the attacker and physically restrained him until police arrived on the scene. Officers took the suspect into custody, and an investigation is now underway.
Berlin’s Israeli embassy condemned the assault in a post on X, lamenting that even children were not spared and warning that antisemitic rhetoric has a way of curdling into violence.
The attack landed on the same day Germany’s Federal Association of Departments for Research and Information on Antisemitism (RIAS) released its annual report, and the timing underscored its findings. The government-funded body, which tracks incidents across eleven German states, documented roughly 8,700 antisemitic incidents nationwide in 2025 — the large majority of them connected, directly or pretextually, to the war in Gaza. Report authors noted that the hostility is frequently aimed at Jews simply for being Jewish, regardless of their individual views on the conflict.
The report catalogued other disturbing cases from the past year, including the beating and robbery of a Haredi rabbi in the state of Hesse, attacked in front of his own children by assailants who blamed him personally for the war. It also documented online threats, among them a Facebook message sent to a Jewish woman featuring an image of a Zyklon B canister — the gas used in Nazi extermination camps — captioned with the words “still in stock.”
RIAS classified four incidents over the past year as “extreme acts of violence.” The most severe came in February 2025, when a Spanish tourist was stabbed near Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe by an attacker who mistook him for Jewish. The tourist survived a serious injury, and his attacker was sentenced to 13 years in prison this past March.
For Chabad’s network of shluchim, incidents like this strike especially close to home. The Berlin attack happened not at some anonymous public event but on the most routine of walks: a father bringing his children home from Shabbat services.
Despite the rising number of incidents, Chabad centers across Germany have continued their work largely unchanged, maintaining the same public, visible presence in Jewish communal life that makes their members identifiable — and, increasingly, targets — on the street. Community leaders have renewed calls for German authorities to ensure swift prosecution and stronger protective measures for Jewish residents, arguing that each unanswered incident makes the next one more likely.
As the investigation into the Charlottenburg attack proceeds, the case adds one more entry to a tally that, per RIAS’s own numbers, is no longer measured in isolated incidents but in the thousands.
