A Jewish cemetery has been desecrated by vandals in Germany.

Six tombstones were targeted by the vandals, who sprayed graffiti including the Nazi slogan “Sieg Heil” and the phrase “S**t Jews” on them.

Police are now conducting an investigation into the attack on the graveyard in the northeastern city of Rostock and have said they have a good idea of who was behind it.

"We are tracking one suspect in particular,” a police spokesman said. “There was probably a group with him but I cannot say for sure.” It comes after a violent antisemitic attack on a rabbi in Berlin. Daniel Alter, who was with his six-year-old daughter at the time, was struck several times in the face and was left with a fractured jawbone.

Germany’s Jewish community has risen to around 200,000 following the influx of Jews from the Former Soviet Union.

Last month charges were filed against a mohel in Bavaria, following a May ruling at the district court in Cologne
that banned religious circumcision.

In Berlin this week the Berlin senator for justice and consumer protection laid out strict regulations for circumcision, under which it would be a criminal act unless carried out as a medical procedure. A representative body for German Jewry unanimously rejected the statement as “a “flagrant intervention in the over-3,000-year tradition of Judaism”.