Germany’s far-right AfD party on Sunday created a “Jewish” group within its ranks which it said would fight against mass immigration of Muslim men with anti-Semitic views, sparking an outcry. The party said a group of 19 people had created “Jews in the AfD” and anyone who could join would have to be a registered member of the party who was either ethnically or religiously Jewish. The move sparked a backlash from Germany’s Jewish community, which called the AfD a “racist and anti-Semitic party.” About 250 people, many from Jewish organizations, protested against the new group in Frankfurt on Sunday. “You won’t get a kosher stamp from us,” Dalia Grinfeld, the head of the Jewish Students’ Association in Germany, said at the protest. Leading members of the AfD have repeatedly come under criticism for comments that appear to trivialize the Holocaust. Party leader Alexander Gauland in June described the Nazi era as “a stain of bird droppings in over 1,000 years of successful German history.” Another leading AfD politician, Björn Höcke, criticized the sprawling Holocaust memorial in Berlin, calling it a “monument of shame.” Ahead of Sunday’s opening, Jewish organizations including the Central Council of Jews in Germany released a statement condemning the AfD. “The AfD is a party that provides a home for hatred of Jews and the relativization or even denial of the Holocaust,” it said. AfD deputy parliamentary group leader Beatrix von Storch hit back in an interview published in the Welt am Sonntag newspaper on Sunday. Von Storch took aim at the Central Council of Jews, comparing it to “official churches,” which she dismissed as “part of the establishment.” The AfD positions itself as a group that offers voters an “alternative” to the established mainstream parties. The AfD, which capitalized on discontent over the influx of asylum seekers in 2015 and 2016, is now the largest opposition party in Germany with over 90 seats in parliament. The deputy leader of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s CDU parliamentary group, Stephan Harbarth, described the AfD’s attempt to establish a Jewish wing as “hypocrisy”. “Anyone who describes the Holocaust as bird droppings in German history is not fighting anti-Semitism, but is mocking its victims and is certainly not on the side of the Jews,” Harbarth told the Sunday edition of the daily Bild.