Man arrested over Yom Kippur attack on Polish synagogue
Police make arrest a rock was thrown through the window of shul in the city of Gdansk
A man accused of hurling a rock through the window of a synagogue in the Polish city of Gdansk on Yom Kippur has been arrested.
The man was detained on Friday in the nearby community of Trabki Wielkie, a day after security camera video footage of the alleged vandal attacking the synagogue was released. The video prompted several calls to police.
Gdansk police did not release the name of the suspect.
No one was hurt in the attack on the New Synagogue during one of Judaism’s holiest days.
The rock fell “in the atrium where women waiting for neilah — the final prayer of Yom Kippur,” the Jewish Religious Community in Gdansk wrote on its Facebook page. “There were children around. The rock flew several centimetres from where women were standing.”
Several days after the Yom Kippur incident, the gravesite of prominent 19th and 20th century Chassidic rabbi, Rebbe Yechiel Meir, who was appointed rabbi of the south-central Polish city of Ostrowiec, was found vandalised in the city’s Jewish cemetery.
The gravestone recently was erected by the rebbe’s descendants and by Jewish Holocaust survivors from the city, with the assistance of the “J-nerations”, an organisation working to preserve the remnants of the Jewish communities in Poland and in other places throughout Europe, Ynet reported.
The windows of the Ohel surrounding the grave-site were shattered and the walls around it smashed, Hamodia reported. Glass bottles also were smashed at the site.
The Jewish cemetery in Ostrowiec has been turned into a public park, where local residents walk their dogs.
Police said they frequently patrol the area, Ynet reported.
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