Halle synagogue was told ‘there is no acute threat’ when members requested more police security

Conflicting reports suggest between 50 and 80 people — members of the Halle’s Jewish community, the majority of whom hail from the former Soviet Union, along with guests from the United States — were inside the synagogue at the time.

No one from Halle’s Jewish community was killed or injured.

But the attack has provoked questions about whether the security provided by federal and state governments in Germany for Jewish communities is adequate.

No police were guarding the building at the time of the attack and it took authorities ten minutes to arrive emergency services were called, Mr Privorozki said.

And the events came mere days after an attempted attack on the Neue Synagoge in Berlin. A 23-year-old Syrian ran at synagogue security personnel with a knife reportedly screaming “Allahu akbar” and “F**k Israel!”

Though police routinely guard synagogues in larger cities like Berlin and Frankfurt, this was not the case in Halle.

Anastassia Pletoukhina, who was inside the synagogue at the time of the attack, told the Jüdische Allgemeine newspaper that the synagogue had asked for police protection in the past but had been told there was “no acute threat.”

Josef Schuster, head of Germany’s main Jewish organisation, told German television it was “scandalous” that Halle’s synagogue was not under direct police protection on Yom Kippur.

The police’s “negligence has now backfired. It is actually a miracle that there were no further casualties as a result of this attack,” he said.

Felix Klein, the German government’s antisemitism tsar, said that the terror attacks demonstrated “how important security measures are for Jewish establishments are in Germany.”

That the suspect, Stephan B., has been identified as a right-wing extremist with an antisemitic motive has also spurred reflection on the place of Jew hatred in Germany society.

The liberal Süddeutsche Zeitung termed the Halle attack “the return of hatred”, a violent demonstration of a disease that Germany has never entirely cured.

“Since the founding of the federal republic more than 70 years ago, a minority of the population, a so-called residuum, has held fast to certain antisemitic convictions,” the paper said, noting a history of attacks on synagogues and Jewish cemeteries in Germany over the past few decades.

The attack took place in a climate of increasing antisemitism, including increasing prevalent conspiracy theories involving the Hungarian-born Jewish philanthropist George Soros.

So too does the Halle attack fit another pattern, one noted in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung: that of a lone male, radicalised by and able to become part of a community online, beholden to violent extreme right-wing ideas, partaking in a bloody attack on a minority community.

The parallels between the Christchurch attack and recent assaults on synagogues in Pittsburgh, Poway in California and now Halle are all too evident.

Antisemitism and the probability of lone wolf attacks are not merely German problems but international ones too.