Felix Klein’s comments come after music award is given to bestselling rap album that makes light of Holocaust

A newly appointed special envoy tasked by the German government with tackling the country’s rising wave of antisemitism has said he is not surprised that, following a series of high-profile race hate attacks, Jews are considering leaving Germany.

Felix Klein, who is due to take up his post this week, said he plans to launch a nationwide register to chart all crimes against the country’s estimated 100,000-strong Jewish community, saying antisemitic attitudes were mainstream in German society.

“It is quite understandable that those who are scared for the safety of their children would consider leaving Germany,” he said at his first discussion with journalists in Berlin. “I hear this from my own Jewish friends. But we must do everything to avoid that.”

Klein said that he hoped to gain a better overview of what was fuelling such antisemitism and to “tackle it like a surgeon”.

Chancellor Angela Merkel has spoken of a “different type of antisemitism”, which some of the million-plus refugees from Muslim countries had brought to Germany since the summer of 2015.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest German rappers Farid Bang, left, and Kollegah receive an award at the country’s Echo Music Prize for an album that contains antisemitic lyrics. The awards have since been scrapped. Photograph: Axel Schmidt/AFP/Getty Images

Klein warned that this “imported” antisemitism had often been stoked further by some of the thousands of ultra-conservative salafi Muslims living in Germany. But, he added, reliable statistics also showed that regardless of the refugee influx, “around 20% of all Germans hold antisemitic views, a statistic that has remained stable for years and never gone down”.

His comments came just days after Germany’s main music awards ceremony, Echo, was scrapped by the music industry association following outrage after one of the main awards was given to a rap album containing antisemitic lyrics that make light of the Holocaust; it sold more than 200,000 copies.

In 0815, a song on the album, the rappers Kollegah and Farid Bang, refer to their bodies as being “more defined than Auschwitz inmates”, while another line refers to “doing another Holocaust, coming with a Molotov”. Lyrics in their previous raps have repeatedly made other anti-Jewish references.

Daniel Barenboim, the star conductor, himself a Jew, joined a growing number of musicians who handed back their Echo awards in protest, arguing in an open letter: “We must stand united against such voices and not encourage them by giving them prizes and legitimising them.”

A string of other antisemitic incidents have shocked Germany recently, including an attack in broad daylight on a Berlin street on an Israeli man wearing a skull cap. He was beaten with a belt by a Syrian refugee who is now in police custody. The man, Adam Armoush, a 21-year-old Arab-Israeli, said he had worn the cap to prove to a friend his claim that it was dangerous to wear a kippah in public in Germany.

The response of Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, to the incident was to advise Jews not to wear skullcaps in urban areas. His warning was seized on by religious leaders, who urged Jews not to give in to antisemitic sentiment. Members of the Jewish community in several German cities organised protests at which people were invited to wear the kippah in solidarity.

Other incidents have included attacks on Jewish children in Berlin schools as well as the bullying of a Dresden schoolgirl who reported outbreaks of antisemitic rhetoric in the classroom. She was awarded for her bravery before heading off for a sabbatical in New Zealand.

Michel Friedmann, a German-French publicist whose parents lost most of their family in the Holocaust, told German television: “I’ve lived in this country for 50 years. There’s not a day goes by which is free of hatred towards Jews … On the one hand there’s the hatred in the centre of society that comes from a 2,000-year- old tradition of Christian Europe …and led under Hitler to the gassing and murder of six million Jews.

“And for the past few years we’ve seen a hatred that comes from parts of the Muslim community, from countries where hating Jews and Israel is part of the state doctrine. The fact is that Jews in Germany are in danger.”

• This article was amended on 11 May 2018 to remove quotation marks from a headline that read: Merkel’s antisemitism envoy ‘not surprised’ Jews want to leave Germany. The writer had not put this in quotes in the story.