A French rabbi was attacked at a Paris train station. Elie Dahan, chief rabbi of Nord-Pas-de-Calais in the north of France, was attacked Thursday morning at Paris’ Gare du Nord station. Dahan, who was coming from Lille, was walking alone at the station around 11 a.m. when a man believed to be about 20 years old, accompanied by a woman, started shouting, “Don’t look at me like this, dirty Jew. I’ll knock you, dirty Jew.” The man punched Dahan in the face and then ran away. “My glasses were broken and my eye started bleeding. Several people tried to catch the aggressor, but he escaped,” Dahan said. Dahan was transferred to a hospital, where his eye was treated. Sami Ghozlan, a former police officer and head of the National Agency Against Anti-Semitism, asked police to demand to see the station’s surveillance video. CRIF, a French Jewish umbrella organization, condemned the attack. Mayor Bertrand Delanoe called the attack “a blow to the values of respect and diversity which are at the heart of the Parisian identity.”
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