The German far-right party Alternative für Deutschland has provoked an outcry by launching what it called a Jewish group within its ranks that it says will battle against the mass immigration of Muslim men who hold antisemitic views.

The party said a group of 19 had formed “Jews in the AfD”, and that anyone joining had to be a card-carrying member of the party who was either ethnically or religiously Jewish.

The move drew a backlash from Germany’s Jewish community, which called the AfD a racist and antisemitic party.About 250 people, many from Jewish organisations, held a protest in Frankfurt on Sunday against the new group.

“You won’t get a kosher stamp from us,” Dalia Grinfeld, who heads the Jewish students’ union in Germany, said at the protest.

Leading members of the AfD have been repeatedly criticised for comments appearing to play down the Holocaust, and Jewish organisations including the Central Council of Jews in Germany issued a statement condemning the the party ahead of Sunday’s march.

“The AfD is a party that provides a home for hatred for Jews as well as the relativising, or even denial of the Holocaust,” it said.

The AfD’s deputy parliamentary group leader, Beatrix von Storch, hit back in an interview published on Sunday by the Welt am Sonntag newspaper.

Taking aim at the Central Council of Jews, she compared it to “official churches” that she dismissed as “part of the establishment”. The AfD positions itself as a group offering voters an alternative to the country’s established mainstream parties.

Capitalising on discontent over an influx of asylum seekers in 2015 and 2016, the AfD is the biggest opposition party in Germany with more than 90 seats in parliament.

The deputy parliamentary group leader of Angela Merkel’s CDU party, Stephan Harbarth, called the AfD’s bid to start a Jewish wing hypocritical.

“Whoever calls the Holocaust a speck of bird poo in German history does not fight antisemitism but mocks its victims, and definitely does not stand on the side of the Jews,” he told Sunday’s edition of Bild.