(JTA) — A Polish ultranationalist burned a poster of the mayor of Wroclaw wearing a kippah during a protest march.
Roman Zielinski, who authored a book titled “How I fell in love with Adolf Hitler,” set the poster of Mayor Rafał Dutkiewicz on fire in front of cameras on Sunday during a march against the European Union in Wroclaw, in western Poland, the PAP news agency reported Monday.
It was not reported whether the mayor was actually wearing the kippah or if it was superimposed on the poster.
The march was organized by the National Radical Camp, or ONR, a formation that was banned in the mid-1930s because of its extremism but reactivated in 1993. Zielinski is a figurehead of a faction of fans of the local soccer team Sląsk Wrocław.
In March, Polish prosecutors indicted for incitement a construction contractor from Wroclaw who burned an effigy of a haredi Orthodox Jew at a protest rally several months earlier against Muslim immigration.
Jonny Daniels, the London-born founder of From the Depths, an organization promoting Holocaust commemoration in Poland, called Zielinski’s burning of the poster “a disgusting deplorable act by utter scum” on Facebook.
But noting the spiraling debate in his native country about the anti-Semitism problem of the Labour Party, Daniels warned against allowing such cases to “paint a whole country as anti-Semites.”
Poland, he wrote Tuesday on Facebook, “has its fair share of idiots, but it’s certainly not the ‘elites’ like it is in the UK,” where some from Labor “are calling for more than burning of pictures.”
Daniels was referring to Parliament member Naz Shah, who in 2014 called for transferring Jews from Israel to the United States. She was suspended by the party from her position last week as part of an internal purge against individuals tied to anti-Semitic speech in the party’s ranks.
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