A sign banning Jews from a shop in the northern city of Flensburg has ignited outrage across Germany, drawing comparisons to Nazi-era boycotts and prompting swift condemnation from officials.

“JEWS are banned from here!!!! Nothing personal. Not even antisemitism. I just can’t stand you,” the handwritten notice read. It was removed within 24 hours after police received multiple complaints, but not before photographs circulated widely online.

Israeli Ambassador to Germany Ron Prosor blasted the incident, writing on X: “The 1930s are back. It’s the same old hatred, just in a different font.” Prosor warned that antisemitism “was never about Zionism, it was always about Jewish life. And it never ends harmlessly.”

Germany’s antisemitism commissioner Felix Klein called the notice “antisemitism in its purest form,” telling Die Welt that it directly evoked the Nazi era, when Jews were boycotted and subjected to similar signage.

German Education Minister Karin Prien, herself Jewish, denounced the message as “blatant antisemitism” and urged a “tough crackdown.” Local prosecutors have opened an investigation into the case.

By Thursday, counter-signs scrawled with slogans such as “[expletive removed] Nazis” and “Nazis Out” covered the shopfront. The store’s owner, whose shop sells books and gothic antiques, defended his action in remarks to the Schleswig-Holsteinische Zeitungsverlag, saying it was a response to the war in Gaza. “Jews live in Israel, and I can’t tell between them who are for and against the attacks [on Gaza],” he said.

The controversy erupted just a day after Chancellor Friedrich Merz warned that hostility toward Israel was increasingly serving as a pretext for antisemitism inside Germany. Since Hamas’s October 7, 2023 massacre in southern Israel, Merz said, hatred against Jews had become “louder, more open, more brazen, more violent almost every day.”

(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)