On New Year’s Eve, a 21-year-old man in Ermreuth is said to have smashed the window pane of a synagogue and tried to set the synagogue on fire. According to the Bamberg public prosecutor’s office, it is apparently “an anti-Semitic motivated crime with a right-wing extremist background”. The Munich Central Office for Combating Extremism and Terrorism is investigating the case.
The statement of a police spokesman, who denied local anti-Semitism to the Jüdische Allgemeine, caused much criticism. In the meantime, the official has qualified his statement towards the BR.
Schloss Ermreuth has been in the headlines several times because of right-wing extremism: The place was the seat of the right-wing extremist organization “Wehrsportgruppe Hoffmann”, which was banned in January 1980.
At the end of March 2023, the Munich Public Prosecutor’s Office, the central anti-Semitism commissioner of the Bavarian judiciary, brought charges against the 22-year-old suspect who carried out an arson attack on the synagogue in Ermreuth on New Year’s Eve. This was announced by the Munich Public Prosecutor’s Office on Friday, 14th of April 2023.
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