Polish rabbi attacked in Warsaw

KRAKOW, Poland – Poland’s chief rabbi was punched and attacked with what appeared to be pepper spray in downtown Warsaw in what police said may have been an anti-Semitic attack.

Michael Schudrich, a New Yorker who became Poland’s chief rabbi in 2004, was heading to a Sabbath lunch Saturday near Warsaw’s main synagogue with a group of people when a young man yelled out “Poland for Poles!”

“That’s a well-known pre-World War II slogan which basically means ‘Jews, get out of Poland,’ and I didn’t like hearing it. So I approached the gentleman to ask him why he said such things and his reaction was to punch me in the chest,” Schudrich said.

“I was going to hit him back. But before I had a chance to hit him he sprayed me with some kind of spray – maybe pepper spray.”

Schudrich said his eyes still burned from the spray but that he was otherwise uninjured. His attacker escaped.

Prime Minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz called Schudrich to express his regrets and “declare that there is no place for anti-Semitism,” government spokesman Konrad Ciesiolkiewicz told the news agency PAP.

The attack is “especially painful because it happened during the visit of Pope Benedict XVI to Poland, when the whole country is in prayer,” Ciesiolkiewicz said.

Before World War II, Poland had a Jewish community of about 3.5 million that was nearly wiped out in the Holocaust. Those who survived faced repression under communism, which ended in 1989. Today, the community is tiny.