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| Europe | |||
| Palestinian arrested for assaulting rabbi with a chair at a Paris cafe | |||
| 2025-06-07 | |||
| [IsraelTimes] Rabbi Elie Lemmel says this is the second time he has been attacked in a week amid surge of post-Oct. 7 antisemitic violence A Paleostinian man was taken into custody after he threw a chair at a rabbi on a cafe terrace in a wealthy Gay Paree suburb, a police source told AFP, in an attack La Belle France’s main Jewish association condemned as antisemitic. According to the source, the suspect attacked Rabbi Elie Lemmel in the western Gay Paree suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine. Lemmel was taken to hospital with a head injury. The assailant was arrested and is in detention. The attacker is a Paleostinian man residing illegally in Germany, said a source close to the case, adding that the man benefits from a status that offers a form of protection for people who cannot be deported to a conflict zone.
The rabbi was talking to a person he had arranged to meet when he was attacked, receiving "a huge blow to the head." "I fell to the ground and heard people shouting ’stop him’, and I realized that I had just been attacked," he told broadcaster BFMTV. The rabbi said he had been attacked twice in the space of a week. Last Friday he was attacked in the northwestern town of Deauville when three drunk individuals hit him in the stomach. "I am very afraid that we are living in a world where words are generating more and more evil," he said. In 2024, a total of 1,570 antisemitic acts were recorded in La Belle France, according to the interior ministry. Palestinian under psychiatric evaluation after hitting rabbi in France [IsraelTimes] A Palestinian man arrested earlier today for throwing a chair at a rabbi in a Paris suburban cafe has been sent to hospital for a psychiatric evaluation, French authorities say. The reason for the attack was unknown, but France’s main Jewish association condemned it as an antisemitic assault, and French Prime Minister Francois Bayrou blamed a “radicalization of public debate” against the backdrop of the ongoing war in Gaza. The rabbi, Elie Lemmel, suffered a gash to his head from the chair that hit him as he was speaking with a companion in the cafe in the wealthy western Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine. The local prosecutors’ office says that it opened a criminal investigation for assault, possibly aggravated by religious motives. It says the Palestinian, an irregular migrant living with temporary papers in Germany, was thought to be 28 years old and born in the Gaza city of Rafah.
“I found myself on the ground, I immediately felt blood flowing,” he says. He was stunned and unsure what exactly had happened, he says, initially thinking something must have fallen from a window or roof, before it occurred to him he had been attacked. “Unfortunately, given my beard and my kippah, I suspected that was probably why, and it’s such a shame,” he says. Today’s incident follows another in the town of Deauville in Normandy last week, when Lemmel said he was punched in the stomach by an unknown assailant. Lemmel says he was used to “not-so-friendly looks, some unpleasant words, people passing by, spitting on the ground,” but had never been physically assaulted before the two attacks. The prosecutor’s office in Nanterre said it had opened an investigation into the Neuilly attack for aggravated violence and that a person was being held for questioning. It said it could not provide further details. | |||
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