From Berlin police reports, October 7: A group of people is handing out baklava on Sonnenallee boulevard in Neukölln to celebrate the Hamas attack on Israel. In the evening, up to 65 people gather in Neukölln and chant anti-Israeli slogans.

Ella Berger has begun buying her cucumbers at the Rewe supermarket. Until recently, she says, she would always go to the Arabic greengrocers a couple hundred meters further down the road, because his cucumbers taste like the ones she knows from Israel: crisp, almost sweet. "My children would eat them for dessert."

But ever since Hamas killed 1,400 people in Israel on October 7 and kidnapped around 220 more, Berger has been living in a different Berlin.

She worries about what might happen if she were now to go into the shop and speak Hebrew. "I’m scared," she says. Which is also why she asked that her real name not be used for this story. And why they have now switched to the large, German cucumbers at home. "They taste like plastic," Berger says.

The 42-year-old also hardly speaks Hebrew with her children on the streets any longer and reprimands them when they do. Recently, on a trip to the museum, she elected not to take the subway, even though it stops right around the corner, and chose to drive instead.

Berger’s grandfather survived the Holocaust, and she grew up in Israel, where rockets from Hamas and Hezbollah were common occurrences. She and her husband moved to Berlin eight years ago because of the city’s reputation, in Israel as well, for being diverse and open.

Berlin, of all places, the city from which Adolf Hitler ruled over Nazi Germany. When the Nazis came to power here, 160,000 Jews lived in the city, around a third of Germany’s total Jewish population. By the end of the war, only 1,500 remained – with the rest having been murdered in the Holocaust or driven to suicide or to flee abroad.

Following decades of division, the city transformed once the Berlin Wall fell, blossoming into the worthy capital of a unified, democratic Germany – and into one of the most popular cities in Europe. Young Israelis flocked to the city, many coming for the clubs, while others opened restaurants and shops. Jewish life began to grow. Currently, around 5,000 Israelis are living in the city and the Jewish Community of Berlin has more than 8,000 members.

Berger, too, was attracted by the city’s reputation. Now, she says: "For the first time, I understand what it means to be a Jew: To not really feel safe anywhere."

What is she afraid of?

"That my children are yelled at, spit on or beat up on the street, for example."

Her son is six and her daughter is four. They're sitting in the next room watching television. Both were born in Berlin and attend a public school and public daycare, respectively, located nearby. It was important for Berger and her husband that the children grow up completely normally. The children don’t know that war is raging in their parents’ home country and that the decades-long conflict between Israel and Palestinians is boiling over. Nor do they know anything about the Holocaust yet. "When we walk by Stolpersteinen," – those small plaques in German sidewalks marking the former homes of Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust – "we tell them: They are for people who died in the war."

Their parents don’t want the children to know yet that in the city where they were born, people like them were once oppressed, interned and systematically murdered. And they don’t want them to know that the streets of Berlin could once again be growing dangerous for them.

Fears of being attacked are one thing, says Berger. She is even more afraid that maybe someone won’t stand up for them if they are attacked. That society at large might accept a Jew being attacked on the street for being a Jew.

October 10: On a remaining piece of the Berlin Wall in the neighborhood of Friedrichshain, somebody smears five swastikas on an area measuring 40 by 150 centimeters (around 16 inches by 60 inches) and writes "Kill Jews."

October 11: Unknown perpetrators rip down the Israeli flag flying in front of Berlin City Hall and throw it in a trash can.

October 12: A man tries to climb the flagpole in front of Berlin City Hall to tear down the Israeli flag flying there. In the Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood, somebody daubs a Star of David on a building entrance.

When Hamas calls for a "day of rage" on Friday, October 13, several Jewish restaurants in Berlin take the precaution of staying closed. But Yorai Feinberg's establishment isn’t one of them. "Closing would send the wrong message," he says. "It would be a victory for the terrorists." He's the owner of Feinberg’s, a restaurant in Berlin’s Schöneberg neighborhood. His name became well known in Germany when a man yelled at him in front of his restaurant in 2017: "You will all end up in the gas chambers!" Feinberg’s girlfriend filmed the incident and posted it on the internet.

Feinberg says that at his restaurant, he lives with a kind of "anti-Semitic background noise." But leading up to this particular Friday the 13th, that background noise grew louder: "Dirty Jewish swine," an anonymous caller growled through the phone. On the evening of October 13, most of the tables were empty, though there were a few guests sitting at outdoor tables, plates of hummus, sabich or kibbeh before them. The sun had set, and Shabbat had begun. A police vehicle was parked out in front of the restaurant.

The guests were nervous, says Feinberg, as were his employees and their families. Everybody at Feinberg’s was fully aware that the restaurant could be a possible target. Some of the guests expressed their solidarity that evening with touching gestures. One group brought in a small olive tree, and there were hugs and tears as they presented it to the staff. Friday evening remained quiet – here, at least.

October 13: Police discover anti-Israeli posters on Sonnenallee in the Neukölln district. A staffer at the district town hall in Reinickendorf notices that a hole has been burned through the Israeli flag flying out front – 10 meters off the ground. In Friedrichshain, somebody daubs a Star of David on a building entrance. At night, a passerby notices several anti-Israeli posters at the Eastside Gallery, a leftover stretch of the Berlin Wall in Friedrichshain.

Hannah Shule Katz’s choir rehearsals now take place under police protection. She sings in a Jewish choir, and armed police officers are now posted at the entrances. "I used to think that the state protected Jewish establishments because it wanted to. Now, I’ve realized for the first time: It does so because it has to," she says.

Katz is 32 years old and has been living in Berlin since 2018. But she’s never seen anything like what’s currently going on. In her synagogue, she relates, some people have said that their mezuzahs have been torn off their doorframes at home. A mezuzah is a small metal capsule containing a handwritten piece of parchment and it is supposed to protect those who live inside.

Hannah Shule Katz wears hers around her neck. Her father gave her the necklace with the mezuzah and a Star of David when he returned from a kibbutz in Israel. "I simply can’t take it off," she says. "Without it, I feel like I’m not completely dressed." Sometimes, says Katz, she hides it beneath her T-shirt when she is out at night.

She is originally from Boston, her German grandfather having fled to the United States. "He once told me: 'We felt safe in Germany.'" For the first time, she says, she knows what her grandfather meant: "This feeling that everything is OK, until suddenly, it isn’t OK anymore."

But Katz says she has no interest in hiding and is going to synagogue more frequently than she used to. "I have never felt as Jewish as I do now," she says. "There's this sentence that we say: 'Am Israel Chai!,' 'the people of Israel are alive.' It was exclaimed after the Holocaust, and we exclaim it today as well."

October 14: In the Wilmersdorf neighborhood of Berlin, somebody smears an anti-Semitic slogan, measuring 60 by 100 centimeters, on the front of a government building. In Moabit, a woman discovers a red Star of David, 30 by 30 centimeters, in the entryway of a student residence hall. In Hellersdorf, youth rip down an Israeli flag from a flagpole and light it on fire.

Gal Mizrachi has been sleeping at a friend’s house for the past few days. He is afraid of going into his own apartment. He, too, has asked that his real name not be used for this article out of fear that it could make him a target. Mizrachi is 20 years old, a quiet young man with round glasses. He moved to Berlin from Israel two years ago to study trumpet. His grandfather lived here before the Holocaust. Mizrachi lives in a part of the city where many people with Arabic and Turkish roots also live. He says that he had never before experienced anti-Semitism in Berlin.

A few days after the Hamas attack on Israel, he and two friends were walking down Friedrichstrasse, a shopping street in central Berlin, chatting in Hebrew. He says they had just walked past a convenience store when a man ran out and started yelling "Jew, Jew!" in Arabic. The man, he says, ran up to them, coming within just a couple of centimeters. When they ran away, he spit at them, he says.

He says that Palestinian flags are now emblazoned on the fronts of numerous buildings in his Berlin neighborhood. And ever since he was spat on, he no longer feels safe in his apartment. People in the building where he lives, he says, know that he's Jewish. He is now sleeping in a shared apartment belonging to some friends of his where a room opened up for a few days, and he is looking for a new apartment. If he can’t find anything, he says, he’s planning to grab his mattress from his apartment and sleep at his friends’ places.

Outside, he says, he no longer speaks Hebrew in public. "It’s absurd: Eighty years after the Holocaust, Jews in Germany are again afraid of going out on the street," he says. When his mother calls him on his mobile phone, he answers in English, saying: "I’ll call you back later."

October 15: On Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, 1,000 people take part in a pro-Palestinian demonstration. Many of the participants glamorize Hamas and chant anti-Israeli slogans. People across the city call the police to report Stars of David and anti-Israeli slogans painted on the walls of buildings.

October 16: In Neukölln, an unidentified assailant throws a firework at a young couple who are conversing in Hebrew. Youth verbally berate a janitor in Moabit who is raising the Israeli flag at the district city hall. Later, unknown perpetrators try to tear the flag from the flagpole.

Adeline Perl learned from a neighbor that somebody had scratched a swastika into the metal frame of her building’s doorbell panel. Because her bedroom faces the street, she grew worried about sleeping in her own bed and moved to the living room for the night.

The next day, she and her two children left Berlin for vacation. The trip had been previously planned, but the timing couldn’t have been better. Her children attend a Jewish school, and they wear the kippa and tzitzit – the long, white tassels that hang below the waist. "I now ask them to hide the tzitzit and to wear caps," she says.

Perl grew up in Moabit and went to school together with Muslim children. In high school, she says, she once left history class in tears because Muslim classmates had laughed and claimed that the Holocaust had never happened. She has lived in New York, Paris and Tel Aviv, but when she was pregnant, she and her husband came back to Berlin from Israel. And now the incident with the swastika.

When asked if she has ever experienced anything like that in Berlin before, she says: "No, and we don’t want our children to grow up like this. I never would have thought that I or my children would ever experience something like that."

That she has to be worried about sleeping in her own bedroom. That she has to think every day about whether it is safe to send her children to school. That people have tried to burn down her synagogue. In the city where she was born. Perl tries to hold back the tears as she talks about it.

"My family survived the Holocaust and the Yom Kippur War, otherwise I wouldn’t be here," she says. "But we now need support of society."

Perl says that she and her husband had been planning to move back to Israel at some point with the children, if they want to. But now, they are planning on returning earlier. "There," she says, "nobody is going to carve a swastika into the doorbell panel, I don’t have to hide the fact that we are Jewish and the children will learn in the army how to defend themselves."

October 17: In Neukölln and at the Brandenburg Gate, pro-Palestinian demonstrators throw rocks and bottles at the police. The police protect the Holocaust memorial. In the Friedenau neighborhood, unknown perpetrators paint a Star of David on the street measuring four by five meters along with anti-Semitic slogans.

The silence is the worst, says Maximilian Feldhake. He is a rabbi and has been living in Berlin since 2013. For years, he has been working together with mosque congregations and Muslim organizations in the city to bring Jews and Muslims closer together. But after the Hamas attack, Feldhake says, none of his Muslim counterparts got in touch with him.

"Radio silence," he says, eyebrows raised.

Nobody called to ask how he was doing or whether they could help. "I don’t necessarily expect Palestinians and Muslims who live here in Germany to show solidarity with Israel. But the minimum would be to say: Anti-Semitism in Germany maybe isn’t the best thing."

He says he now finds himself wondering if the people he used to work with in the mosques might actually be pleased about the Hamas attack. "Did they used to say that they were in favor of dialogue between Jews and Muslims because they knew that’s what society expected of them?"

Feldhake says that he isn’t the panicky type, but since October 7, he has been covering up his kippa with a black baseball cap when he goes out. Like almost everyone we spoke with for this story, Feldhake also believes that the situation for Jews in Berlin will grow worse. He says that he actually isn’t too concerned about being attacked on the street. "I think that planned attacks on Jewish facilities are more likely."

October 18: At night, unknown assailants throw two Molotov cocktails at a Jewish community center in Berlin’s Mitte district. In the evening, pro-Palestinian demonstrations escalate in Neukölln, with protestors setting up a burning street barricade and shooting fireworks at police.

October 22: In the Hellersdorf neighborhood, unknown perpetrators steal an Israeli flag from a building. Police later find the flag, which has been partially burned. In Gesundbrunnen, unknown assailants throw a rock at a Jewish hospital.

Tomer Dotan-Dreyfus is looking for a place to sit in a Turkish café in Schöneberg. Some of the tables are occupied by families or students, downstairs is a Muslim prayer room.

An Israeli author, Dotan-Dreyfus lives in the neighborhood, and he has called Berlin his home for the last 13 years. The 35-year-old has mottled gray hair and wears glasses. His mother tongue is Hebrew, but he wrote his first novel in German. Politically, Dotan-Dreyfus leans left and has regularly been sharply critical of the Israeli government. He is active on behalf of human rights for Palestinians. For him, the last several days have clearly demonstrated: "Hamas is bad for the Palestinians, and the Israeli government is bad for the Israelis."

He is concerned about the situation in Berlin and is afraid that the situation could grow even worse. "The way the police are treating demonstrators in Neukölln is extremely confrontational. We have to find a way to deescalate the situation."

His views of the city have changed. "When people used to tell me that Jews cannot feel safe in some parts of the city, I was always the first to say, what nonsense," he says. "But after the images from Neukölln in recent days, I am afraid to walk through certain neighborhoods. And it is hard for me to say that."