WARSAW, Poland (JTA) — Leaders of the Polish Jewish community expressed sympathy with the Muslim community following an attack on a mosque in Warsaw.
On Monday night, rocks and bricks thrown at the Muslim Cultural Center in Warsaw smashed the building’s windows. The garden also was destroyed.
Security camera footage showed at least two perpetrators, but they did not get inside the building.
It was not the first time the mosque has been targeted.
Leslaw Piszewski, president of the Union of Jewish Communities in Poland, and Polish Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich wrote a letter to Mufti Tomasz Miśkiewicz, president of the Muslim Religious Union in Poland, in which they condemned the “increasing tendency of aggressive verbal and physical attitudes towards cultural and religious minorities in Poland in recent times.”
Nedal Abu Tabaq, a mufti at the center, said Wednesday saying that in a few or more years, Muslims will be given numbers.
“The Jews had numbers in the camps, I would have a bar code,” he said in an interview with RMF radio.
Warsaw has a Muslim community of about 22,000 and there are two mosques in the city. About 500 people come to pray in the cultural center’s mosque, community leaders told local media. The center’s members are mainly immigrants from Arab countries.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
