Warsaw’s main synagogue was attacked with firebombs overnight by an unknown perpetrator, but there was minimal damage and nobody was hurt, Poland’s chief rabbi said on Wednesday.
The incident was strongly condemned by political leaders.
The attack on the Nozyk Synagogue happened at around 1am, the country’s American-born chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich, told the Associated Press.
He said the synagogue was hit with three firebombs, or Molotov cocktails, and only suffered minimal damage “by tremendous luck or miracle”.
A black area that appeared to be the result of flames could be seen at one spot on the building.
Poland’s president, Andrzej Duda, wrote on social media site X, formerly Twitter, that he condemned “the shameful attack”, adding: “There is no place for antisemitism in Poland! There is no place for hatred in Poland!”
Foreign minister Radek Sikorski noted that the incident fell on the 20th anniversary of Poland joining the European Union along with nine other countries, most of them Central European nations that had been under the Soviet sphere of influence for decades.
“Thank God no-one was hurt. I wonder who is trying to disrupt the anniversary of our accession to the EU,” he wrote on X. “Maybe the same ones who scribbled Stars of David in Paris?”
France said last year that it had been the target of a Russian online destabilisation campaign which used automated social media accounts to whip up controversy and confusion about spray-painted Stars of David that appeared in Paris streets and fed alarm about surging antisemitism during the Israel-Hamas war.
Poland, which until the Holocaust was the home of Europe’s largest Jewish community, numbering some 3.3 million, now counts a few thousand Jewish inhabitants in its population.
