Jewish supporters of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) have founded their own association within the party in a move vociferously condemned by a broad coalition of German Jewish organisations.

Established five years ago as an anti-Euro party, the AfD has grown in popularity since 2015 when it took on a far-right populist anti-immigration message during the refugee crisis.

The 20 founders of the “Jews in the AfD” group were formally set to be unveiled at a press conference near Frankfurt on Sunday.

In a joint declaration, the mainstream of the German Jewish community said the AfD is “racist and antisemitic,” “no party for Jews,” and a “danger to Jewish life in Germany.”

The AfD “is a party in which Jew-hatred as well as Holocaust denial find a home,” the declaration added.

“The problem is that the AfD are exploiting a handful of Jews for their own ends,” president of the German Jewish Students’ Union Dalia Grinfeld told the JC.

“They are trying to whitewash the party.”

A party that supports a ban on religious circumcision and kosher slaughter, Ms Grinfeld argued, is no friend of German Jews and cannot claim to be free from anti-Semitism.

But Wolfgang Fuhl, a former member of the Central Council of Jews in Germany and co-founder of the new AfD group, said: “In German there’s an expression: Whose bread I eat, their song I sing.”

He claimed that the Central Council’s funding from the state had caused them to “conform” and “freely surrender to the ruling Merkel regime, which at its core is socialist or communist—she is certainly not a conservative woman.”

Mr Fuhl joined the AfD in 2013. Aligned with the party’s liberal-conservative wing, he was motivated by his opposition to the Euro-area bailout programmes and what he saw as the “erosion” of Germany’s constitutional state, which he says accelerated during the 2015 refugee crisis—“a clear breach of the Dublin Convention and the German Basic Law.”

Islamist antisemitism, Mr Fuhl added, is the greatest danger to Jewish life in Germany today.

Leading AfD politicians have found themselves in hot water in recent months for remarks downplaying German history.

Party leader Alexander Gauland has said “Hitler and the Nazis were but a birdsh*t in over a thousand years of Germany’s prolific history”, while in 2017 he remarked Germans “have the right to be proud of the contributions German soldiers made in both world wars.”

Ms Grinfeld, the student leader, said: “When someone denies the Holocaust or argues that the Holocaust wasn’t so bad, then that is clearly antisemitic.

“You can say what you want but the actions of the AfD show they are antisemitic.”

Mr Fuhl condemned his party leader’s “birdsh*t” remark but said the AfD leader “is certainly not an antisemite.”

He said that though there may be individual cases of antisemitism in the AfD, it is not an antisemitic party.

“The AfD stands against any form of antisemitism, whether motivated by Islam, left-wing radicalism, or right-wing radicalism,” Mr Fuhl continued, adding in a biblical reference that AfD’s Jews were not fig leaves.