Vandals struck a synagogue gate in Bulgaria and a monument to the victims of the shooting attack last Yom Kippur near a synagogue in Halle, Germany, in a spate of unrelated incidents last week in Europe, the JTA reported.
In Bulgaria, the words “Free Palestine Israel=Nazis Antifa Bulgaria” were spray-painted Wednesday on the gate to the synagogue of Plovdiv, a city situated about 100 miles southeast of the capital Sofia.
While in Germany, in Halle, a plexiglas panel on the monument of the shooting was smashed. The vandals also tried to set fire to a flag of Israel under the Plexiglas, the Jewish Community of Halle wrote Tuesday on their social media page.
Also in Germany, in a third incident, a structure inside the Jewish cemetery of the town of Krumbach, in southern Germany, was damaged. Police are treating the vandalism as an anti-Semitic case because earlier this year, a nearby picnic table was dismantled and the wooden polls comprising it rearranged on the floor in the shape of a swastika, the website AllgaeuRechtsaussen reported Monday.
Also Monday, metal thieves removed dozens of fences and railings from around tombstones at the Jewish cemetery of Babruysk in Belarus, the news Bobruisk.ru reported.
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Hundreds residents of the German city of Oldenburg marched on Sunday to express their solidarity with the Jewish community following an arson attack at the local synagogue on Friday.
An unknown perpetrator hurled a Molotov cocktail against the door of the synagogue in this city of northern Germany. No one was injured in the attack as caretakers from a neighboring cultural center were quickly able to extinguish the fire, which damaged the door to the place of worship.
Claire Schaub-Moore, chairwoman of the Jewish community in Oldenburg thanked the residents for their support. “We are deeply impressed by this solidarity. We feel this strength and it is much greater than what happened on our doorstep, on the doorstep of the synagogue,” she said.
Speaking to the crowd, the city’s Mayor Jürgen Krogman called thge attack against the synagogue “nothing other than attempted murder, terror.”
The leader of Lower-Saxony’s parliament, Hanna Naber, an Oldenburg resident herself, told demonstrators, “We are renewing the promise with which the German Federal Republic was founded: Never again!.”
In a post on X German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser called the act a “disgusting, inhumane attack on Oldenburg’s Jewish men and women.”
Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany,said: “We will not be intimidated. Jewish life belongs to our country, to Germany. Those who refuse to accept that fact must bear all legal consequences for their actions.”
Residents of German city march in solidarity with Jewish community following attack on synagogue
