A Berlin court on Monday convicted a 19-year-old Syrian of causing serious bodily harm and of slander for attacking a man wearing a Jewish skullcap in the German capital in April.
The victim, a 21-year-old Arab Israeli who said he wore the kippah to show solidarity with his Jewish friends, filmed his attacker whipping him with a belt and shouting "Yahudi!" ("Jew" in Arabic).
The defendant, whose name was suppressed due to privacy laws, had arrived in Germany in 2015 seeking asylum.
He was sentenced to four weeks of juvenile detention, the maximum under Germany's juvenile criminal law. But as he had already spent more than two months in detention while awaiting trial, he was immediately released.
The court has the right to apply juvenile criminal law in cases involving defendants aged up to 21 and decided to do so in this case because the man was lacking in maturity, said court spokeswoman Lisa Jani.
As part of his sentence, he is required to take part in a tour of Berlin's House of the Wannsee Conference, where the Nazis laid out the Final Solution – their plan to exterminate the Jews – in 1942.
"The court wants to make clear that his attitude toward Jews will not be tolerated here," Jani said.
Video footage of the attack sparked a public outcry when it was posted on the internet in April. The attack was widely condemned and stoked a debate about anti-Semitism in Germany.
During the trial, the defendant admitted whipping the victim with a belt but said he regretted the assault, and apologized to the victim.
Testifying in German and Arabic through a translator, the defendant told the court he had smoked marijuana before the incident.
Jani said the man – who was born in Syria and has a Syrian passport but considers himself Palestinian – would also be given one year of support services, which could include help in finding an apartment and an apprenticeship.
The Jewish community was not satisfied with the ruling.
Sigmount Koenigsberg, the Berlin Jewish community's anti-Semitism commissioner, told Berlin-based broadcaster 105.5 Spreeradio that the ruling was "an absolute joke."
"A few weeks of detention, which have already been served, are not appropriate. The man is laughing himself silly," Koenigsberg said.
Chancellor Angela Merkel personally spoke out against the attack, saying her government would respond "with full force and resolve" against anti-Semitism in Germany. The country has strict laws against incitement, rooted in its experience of Nazism, the ideology of racial supremacy that Adolf Hitler used to justify the Holocaust.
Meanwhile, in a separate incident, police in the western city of Dortmund appealed Monday for witnesses after a 21-year-old Jewish man was allegedly attacked and insulted by three neo-Nazis.
