With Visit, German Diplomat Hopes to Reassure Israel : Mideast: Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel will convey his country’s determination to fight anti-Semitism and violence from the extreme right.

At a time of growing worry about the revival of right-wing extremism in Germany, Klaus Kinkel leaves today for his first official visit to Israel since becoming foreign minister in May.

Foreign Ministry officials here said a key goal of Kinkel’s three-day trip is to reassure Israelis of the German government’s determination to fight anti-Semitism and violence from the extreme right. It also will underscore Germany’s commitment to one of its most difficult foreign relationships.

“We saw the need to make this trip as soon as possible,” said Hanns Schumacher, chief Foreign Ministry spokesman. “There is a lot of fear and worry (in Israel) that an old demon may be coming back.”

The trip comes as a spate of anti-Semitic attacks--virtually unknown in pre-unification West Germany--has shaken the country’s small but growing Jewish community. Desecration of Jewish cemeteries in several German cities and attacks on concentration camp memorials at Sachsenhausen, Ravensbrueck and near Dachau have all occurred in the past two months.

Police in major cities were put on special alert last week as Jews and many Germans joined in commemorative services marking the 54th anniversary of Kristallnacht , the night in 1938 when bands of young Nazis roamed the streets, attacking Jews and burning synagogues and Jewish-owned stores.

“Jews in this country are frightened,” said Ignatz Bubis, chairman of the Central Council of Jews in Germany.

Equally disturbing for many were the remarks earlier this month of a senior local government leader in the northern port city of Rostock. He suggested at a crowded news conference that Bubis had no business judging this summer’s right-wing violence in the city because his Jewish faith made him a citizen of Israel, not Germany.

The local leader, who was forced to resign a few days later, is a member of Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s Christian Democrats.

Speaking Monday to a special congress of the main opposition Social Democrats, Bubis appealed to all of Germany’s mainstream political parties to cooperate in fighting the new wave of extremism.

“We’ve got the most free, most democratic system that has ever existed in Germany, and it must be defended,” he told delegates.

“Many speak of a return to Weimar, but that isn’t true,” Bubis said, referring to Germany’s first attempt at democracy, the 12-year Weimar Republic that followed War I and collapsed into a Nazi dictatorship.

He noted that there have been “recent demonstrations where hundreds of thousands--the silent majority--have come out to show they reject this extremism.”

“But the threat of Weimar can’t be excluded, if the major parties don’t find the grounds for consensus,” he warned.

Last week, Bubis rejected accusations by Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel that Kohl was partly to blame for the recent violence. “I don’t see things as Mr. Wiesel does,” Bubis said.

Despite these developments and the complications they bring to the fragile German-Israeli relationship, Foreign Ministry officials here said Kinkel was unlikely to yield to Israeli requests for $7.5 billion in new assistance from Germany. “That is much, much higher than we are in a position to afford under existing circumstances,” said one Foreign Ministry insider. “He (Kinkel) hardly has any maneuverability.”

Since the early 1950s, Bonn has paid more than $50 billion to individual Jews as partial reparation for the Nazi atrocities during the Holocaust. It recently committed $700 million more for delayed claims now being made by Jews previously behind the Iron Curtain.