Warsaw – Polish police are looking for a man who threw a stone into a synagogue in the city of Gdansk as members of the Jewish community were praying at the end of the Yom Kippur holiday.
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On Thursday, police released security footage of the incident, which shows a man in a dark shirt and jeans walking up to the New Synagogue and throwing a stone into a window.
In a statement, police said Wednesday’s incident occurred at 6 p.m. local time (1600 GMT) in the Baltic port city of Gdansk, and appealed to anybody who recognizes the man to contact police.
They said they had spoken to witnesses and were working to determine if the act was a “hooligan prank” or one motivated by religious hatred.
The same synagogue was also attacked during Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass, an explosion of violence by Nazi Germany against Jews in 1938, when Gdansk was still the Free City of Danzig.
Gdansk Mayor Pawel Adamowicz said he was “appalled,” especially because it took place during prayers marking the end Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement.
“Such things should not happen in the city of freedom and solidarity,” Adamowicz said, referring to Gdansk’s history as the cradle of the Solidarity movement that helped topple communism.
He called on residents to gather Thursday evening outside the synagogue in a show of protest.
Poland’s chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich, said the last such incident in Poland occurred more than 20 years ago when a firebomb was thrown into the Nozyk Synagogue in Warsaw.
“What happened should never happen and must be condemned in clear and strong terms. Yet this does not represent the true face of Gdansk, the birthplace of Solidarity and freedom,” Schudrich told The Associated Press.
He said that people were gathering for prayers when the rock was thrown and that a few people were nearby, but that nobody was hurt.
The World Jewish Congress said it was “shocked and dismayed” and that the incident evoked “the terrible tragedies that occurred in German-occupied Poland during the years of the Holocaust.”
“In recent years, Jews in Poland have been able to worship with a sense of security, and we hope that this attack does not herald negative change in that positive environment,” president Ronald Lauder said.
I don’t know why any Jew remains in Poland or goes to Poland. The soil in that country is full of Jewish blood, each place you step there cries out in pain.
The Polacks hated the Jews more than the Nazis, they were willing helpers to kill the Jews even while fighting against the Nazis.
Besides being a nation of stupid people, they are a nation of antisemites. Don’t go there and don’t let your money get there either. They have never owned up to their hatred of Jews.
What a surprise “Rock Hurled Inside Polish Synagogue During Yom Kippur Prayers”. ???
When Trump went to Warsaw last year, he visited the monument to the revolt of the Poles against the Nazis in 1944; however, he conveniently ignored the monument located a short distance away, where the doomed Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, staged a revolt in 1943, on Erev Pesach. The Poles to this date moan over the fact that they didn’t receive any help from the Allies when they staged their 1944 revolt. Yet, they conveniently omit the fact that they refused to help the Jews during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, by refusing to sell them arms, and in addition, double crossed them. The Jews held out for a month, and a few managed to escape. It was no coincidence that the Nazis located most of their large death camps in Poland, as they knew that the Poles hated Jews. Today, the Poles suffer from amnesia, and play the victim card that “we too were victims”. Even when a few Jews managed to escape from death camps in Poland, they had to deal with a hostile population. In 1946, the few hundred Jews who returned to their homes, were murdered by local Poles. It took the Polish government over 70 years to admit to the pogrom staged in Kielce, whereby dozens of Jews were killed.