A man who allegedly threw a rock into a Polish synagogue in the city of Gdansk during Yom Kippur services on Sept. 19 was arrested by Polish police on Sept. 21.
According to the Associated Press, the 27-year-old man was arrested at a village south of Gdansk; he did not resist arrest. The police have not given a motive for the alleged perpetrator.
Security footage of the incident shows a man wearing jeans and a black shirt throwing a rock into the window of the New Synagogue at around 6 pm local time on Sept. 19. The rock fell into “the atrium where women waiting for neilah — the final prayer of Yom Kippur,” according to the Jewish Religious Community in Gdansk’s Facebook page. No one was hurt.
Pawel Adamowicz, the mayor of Gdansk, said in a statement that he “categorically rejects” the rock-throwing.
“I apologize to the Jewish community of Gdansk,” Adamowicz said. “In the city of Freedom and Solidarity, we respect all religions and do not accept acts of hooliganism.”
World Jewish Congress President Ronald Lauder said, “The attack on Gdansk’s New Synagogue is shocking and dismaying in itself, made all the more distressing by the fact that it took place on Yom Kippur, evoking the terrible tragedies that occurred in German-occupied Poland during the years of the Holocaust.”
New Synagogue was among the synagogues that were attacked on Kristallnacht, the Night of the Broken Glass, where almost 100 Jews were killed and thousands of Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues were vandalized and destroyed.
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