Leaders of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) have been rebuked for belittling the significance of the Nazis and criticizing a Holocaust memorial, but this has not stopped a small group of Jews from throwing their support behind the party.

On Sunday they formed Jews in the AfD, a political group based in the western city of Wiesbaden that seeks to foster support for the party, which says Islam is not compatible with the German constitution.

“We are not a religious organisation, we are a political organisation,” Jews in the AfD leader Wolfgang Fuhl told reporters at the inauguration ceremony, sitting on a podium with fellow Jews including a few wearing the Jewish skullcap.

He said people wishing to join had to meet two requirements: membership in the AfD and ethnic or religious association with the Jewish faith. Twenty people signed up at Sunday’s meeting.

The AfD entered the German parliament for the first time in an election last year, drawing support from a broad array of voters angry with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision in 2015 to welcome almost a million, mainly Muslim asylum seekers.

Its success drew immediate expressions of concern from Israeli officials and Jewish groups in Europe and the United States.

German politicians in June rebuked AfD co-leader Alexander Gauland after he said that Hitler and the Nazis “are just bird shit in 1,000 years of successful German history.”

And Bjoern Hoecke, the AfD’s leader in the eastern state of Thuringia, triggered anger last year after he told supporters that Berlin’s memorial to the victims of the Holocaust was a “memorial of shame” and that history books should be rewritten to focus more on German victims.

But Jews for AfD leader Fuhl dismissed those concerns on Sunday, saying the AfD was the most pro-Israel party in Germany, not least because it supports the Jewish state’s right to have all of Jerusalem as its capital.

‘PRO-ISRAEL’

“The AfD is an exceptionally pro-Israel party, supposedly the most pro-Israel party in the Bundestag,” Fuhl said, referring to the lower house of parliament in which the AfD is the third-largest party.

Palestinians, with broad international backing, seek East Jerusalem as the capital of a state they want to establish in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Israel regards all of the city, including the eastern sector it captured in the 1967 Middle East war and annexed, as its “eternal and indivisible capital”.

Germany, home to an estimated 200,000 Jews, has built a reputation in recent decades as a tolerant, safe place for Jews to live. The rise of the AfD has alarmed the community.

Anti-Semitic crimes reported to the police rose 4 percent to 681 in the first eight months of 2017 against the same period last year, with an overwhelming majority of incidents linked to far-right extremism. The real number is probably much higher.

Members of Jews in the AfD appear unmoved by those figures.

When asked by a journalist what he would say to people who might call him a “Nazi Jew,” Bernhard Krauskopf said speaking in English: “I tell them that ‘you are talking to a Jewish-German person whose father lost more than 50 people in Nazi death camps, you should be a little bit more intelligent not to talk such nonsense.'”

Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, said he was sceptical.

“It doesn’t go together for me,” he told Reuters. “In the end, I have to assume that these are people who simply have not recognised the true ulterior motive, also the goals of this more than right-wing populist party.”

He added: “I think that there are some who think, ‘The AFD is a party that today predominantly campaigns against or targets refugees, migrants, Muslims’. However, I consider it completely wrong to put Muslims under general suspicion. And the formula ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend’ does not work.'”

A leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has poured cold water on plans by Steve Bannon, U.S. President Donald Trump’s former political strategist, to forge a wide populist alliance to undermine the European Union.

“We’re not in America,” Alexander Gauland, one of two co-leaders of the anti-immigrant party, told the Funke Mediengruppe newspaper chain in an interview published on Saturday.

“The interests of the anti-establishment parties in Europe are quite divergent,” he added in comments that amounted to a blunt rebuff of Bannon from one of Europe’s most influential far-right parties.

The former Trump strategist last month announced he had created a Brussels-based political organization called The Movement to rally nationalist and populist voters in European Parliament elections next May, with a goal of undermining and paralysing the bloc.

But Gauland said that while his co-leader Alice Weidel had met once with Bannon, he saw no possibility of cooperating with him. “Mr Bannon will not succeed in forging an alliance of the like-minded for the European elections.”

He said the AfD only had close contacts with Austria’s far-right Freedom Party (FPO), junior party in Austria’s coalition government. Former AfD leader Frauke Petry had always wanted to work with France’s National Front, but that had not worked out.

Raheem Kassam, a spokesman for The Movement, said of Gauland’s comments: “The Movement is a clearing house of ideas, not a campaigning organisation that would seek to have anything to do with AFD’s national policy or election campaigns. We are content that senior AFD figures understand the project and are in touch with us every day. We look forward to working alongside those who want to do so, for the causes we all believe in.”

Gauland told Funke Mediengruppe that his party was polling at 17 to 20 percent in recent surveys, and its support could grow beyond that as long as Chancellor Angela Merkel remained in power.

The party won 12.6 percent of the vote in national elections last September, making it the third largest party and catapulting it into the German parliament for the first time.

Gauland said the AfD needed to become stronger, but he expected it to be ready to take on a governing role in the medium-term.

Political experts say the party could become the strongest party in the eastern German states of Saxony and Brandenburg in regional elections next year, raising the question of whether mainstream parties will reverse course and agree to form coalitions with it.