Anti-Semitic hecklers mar ceremony for German Jewish leader

BERLIN, Dec 13 (AFP) -- A dedication ceremony for a bridge named after Ignatz Bubis, former head of Germany's Jewish community, was disrupted by whistles and anti-Semitic slurs, a Jewish leader said on Wednesday.

Michel Friedman, who is vice president of Germany's Central Council of Jews, of which Bubis was president until his death last year, said that a group of about 10 hecklers had gathered at the site in Frankfurt Tuesday.

They continually attempted to interrupt speakers with shouts, he said.

"They yelled at me 'What are you -- a German or a Jew?'," Friedman told AFP.

"These were good, middle class people, not skinheads."

Friedman added that a member of the group had also called out that the bridge should have been named for Adolf Hitler.

And as Paul Spiegel (left) Bubis's successor as head of the Central Council, mentioned the Nazi death camp Auschwitz, someone in the crowd shouted: "It was the Jews' own fault."

He said that Bubis' widow, Ida, was also accosted with hostile shouts and whistles.

Germany is trying to come to grips with escalating far-right violence against foreigners and other minorities and desecration of Jewish institutions.

In the western city of Saarbruecken, state criminal authorities said Wednesday that two young women and a man beat and seriously injured a 50-year-old Ethiopian man in a racist attack last weekend.

The authorities said the three Germans shouted racist slurs before punching and kicking the man. Two of the three have been detained.

Meanwhile, a court in the southern city of Augsburg sentenced a 20-year-old skinhead to a five-and-a-half-year sentence in a juvenile detention center for what it called a xenophobic attack on a Hungarian man.

The court found him guilty of attempted murder for shooting the man and injuring him in the head.

Friedman said he was "shocked, dismayed and outraged" by the incident at the bridge ceremony, especially since "Frankfurt can be proud to have a bridge with the name Ignatz Bubis".

Bubis, a highly respected figure who was praised for his work to encourage understanding between Jewish and non-Jewish Germans, had expressed bitterness before his death at the age of 72 that Germans, in his view, continued to resist taking responsibility for the Holocaust.

"I've achieved nothing or next to nothing," Bubis told Stern magazine in his last major interview before his death.

He was buried in Israel at his own request (right), because he had said he was concerned that if his tombstone were in Germany, it would be desecrated by neo-Nazis, as was the grave of his precedessor as head of the Central Council, Heinz Galinski.

 The Times obituary of Bubis reveals facts about his past

 Ignatz Bubis dealt in Swiss Gold and with firm which melted dental fillings of Holocaust victims

 Tomb vandal calls him "thief, cheat"

 Bubis complains Jews still strangers in Germany

 Bubis admitted he dealt in suspect Swiss Gold in the early 1950s and with Degussa, a firm which melted down dental fillings of Holocaust victims

 Bubis, A Memoir, written for Action Report in 1997

Jewish Chronicle, London, assesses Bubis' life.