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‘My Friend Anne Frank’ tells the incredible story of how Anne’s best friend survived the Holocaust
(JTA) — One spring morning in 1934, two little girls followed their mothers to a corner grocery store in Amsterdam. The mothers, hearing each other speak German to their daughters, discovered they were both Jewish refugees who had recently fled Nazi Germany. The two girls peeked shyly at each other from behind their mothers’ skirts, one of them slight with dark, glossy hair, the other taller and fairer.
Those two girls were Anne Frank and Hannah Pick-Goslar. One was to become the most famous victim of the Holocaust, whose diary documented two years in hiding before the Nazis found her family and she perished at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp at age 15. The other narrowly survived and made her way to pre-state Israel, eventually enjoying a new life that grew to include three children, 11 grandchildren and 33 great-grandchildren.
The day after their grocery store encounter, the girls recognized each other at the Sixth Montessori School in Amsterdam and became instant best friends. They could not predict that their final encounter would come 11 years later, against all odds, at Bergen-Belsen.
Pick-Goslar spent decades telling her story through interviews and lectures, but her recollections have only just been published for the first time in a memoir, “My Friend Anne Frank,” written with the help of journalist Dina Kraft. She did not live to see its publication on June 6: Pick-Goslar died in October, six months into writing the book and two weeks short of her 94th birthday, leaving Kraft to finish her account.
Kraft spoke with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency about the life of Pick-Goslar, who lived out the future stolen from her dear friend.
The conversation with Kraft, a onetime JTA reporter, has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
JTA: What was it like to tell Pick-Goslar’s story together with her?
Kraft: It was a remarkable experience being able to work with her. We had these very intense interviews where I was asking her to really dig back into her memory. A lot of Holocaust survivors, a lot of survivors of trauma, tend to tell their story — not on autopilot, exactly — but they have a script. It’s perfectly understandable, it’s a tool of self-preservation.
So I was asking her to dive deeper and look more intensely within, and that was not always easy. There were times we would finish the interview after a couple of hours and she would say, “I’m just exhausted, I need to lie down.” And I would say, “Me too,” because it was just exhausting — we were recounting very hard moments.
It got to the point where she would come in the morning and say, “I’m having bad dreams again,” and I would say, “Yeah, me too, I’m having bad dreams also.” Because it was so much of trying to step into her shoes and step into her mindset, and also reading very intensely — it was very much a research project too.
How did Pick-Goslar remember her childhood and friendship with Frank before the war?
She remembers life before the war as incredibly warm and loving. They were wrapped up in a supportive familial environment. Although both she and Anne were refugees from Germany, they came over very young — Anne was 4 and Hannah was 5.
Their parents had a hard time adapting, especially the mothers. Hannah’s mother was born and bred in Berlin, very much a creature of German culture. Her father was a high-ranking official in the Weimar government, so they lived very close to the Reichstag. On top of being horrified that they had just been kicked out of this country they viewed as home, Hannah’s family went back 1,000 years in Germany. So they were heartbroken about their country taking this terrible turn into darkness.
But for Hannah and Anne, it was a very nice life.
What kind of person was Frank, according to her friend?
She was very spunky. She had lots to say and she exhausted the adults around her. She was always challenging them, asking difficult questions, prodding, restless and impatient. The girls loved to play Monopoly, but Anne would get restless and walk off, which is frustrating for a friend! They would push back furniture in the house and do gymnastics together. Later on, when the Germans invaded and they only had other Jewish girlfriends to play with, they formed a club to play ping pong and go for ice cream.
Anne was such a know-it-all that Hannah’s mother had a phrase about her. She said, “God knows all, but Anne Frank knows better!”
But Hannah really saw her as a regular kid — she was just her friend, Anne Frank. She was not an icon of any kind, and she seemed more ordinary than she seemed extraordinary.
In July 1942, Pick-Goslar found her friend’s apartment empty. Like everyone else, she was told that the Franks escaped to Switzerland — not knowing they had actually gone into hiding nearby. What happened to Pick-Goslar while Frank went into hiding?
Hannah was deported a year after Anne went into hiding. In that year, she went back to school. The anti-Jewish laws meant that you couldn’t sit on benches, go to swimming pools, be on a tram, ride your bicycle — and you couldn’t go to school with non-Jewish children.
So Hannah and Anne were both fortunate to be accepted to the Jewish Lyceum, considered one of the more prestigious Jewish schools in Amsterdam under German occupation. But in the fall of 1942, the deportations had already begun. So every day there was a different student and friend missing from class, and different teachers and administrators missing. They never knew whether it was because somebody went into hiding or because they had been deported.
Another thing happened at this time. In October, when Hannah was 14 years old, her mother Ruth was pregnant. She was determined not to go to a hospital because there were rumors of people being deported directly from hospitals, so she gave birth at home with a Jewish doctor and Jewish midwife. The baby ended up being stillborn and Hannah’s mother died the next day.
As more and more Jews were deported, Hannah was protected for a while. Her family secured a pair of South American passports, and they were also on the so-called “Palestine list.” The idea was that eventually they would be part of a prisoner swap between the British and the Germans — German soldiers for “exchange Jews” who would be sent to Palestine, which was under the British mandate.
Pick-Goslar survived to have three children, 11 grandchildren and 33 great-grandchildren. (Eric Sultan/The Lonka Project)
So for a while, Pick-Goslar’s family believed they might be spared. How did she end up at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in northern Germany?
By the end, the Germans rounded up all the remaining Jews from Amsterdam, including those who had special stamps in their passports. By June 1943, Hannah’s family was in one of the final roundups of Jews in Amsterdam.
First they went to Westerbork, a transit camp in Holland on the border with Germany. It was basically a holding purgatory, and from there people were deported either to Auschwitz or Sobibor — in which they were almost certainly killed — or if they were luckier, to Theresienstadt or Bergen-Belsen, which were concentration camps but not death camps. Eventually, after several months in Westerbork, Hannah’s family was deported to Bergen-Belsen.
It was bearable in the first few months and they were still fed, though not much. But by February of 1945, the Russians were approaching in the east and the Germans were trying to move people from outer concentration camps into Germany. So Bergen-Belsen swelled to many times its size and became incredibly overcrowded. There was less and less food and water, and typhus started raging through the camp.
How did Pick-Goslar and Frank find each other again at Bergen-Belsen?
Around this time, a tent camp was erected across from Hannah’s part of the camp. People saw other women speaking different languages — Hungarian, Polish, Greek, and eventually Dutch as well. They were emaciated and skeletal.
The Germans forbade going out to talk at the fence and filled it with straw, so that people wouldn’t see each other anymore. But the women found a way to communicate, and word got to Hannah that Anne Frank was on the other side of the fence. Of course, she didn’t believe it, because the Frank family had left the impression that they were in Switzerland. But she decided to go find out for herself, even though it was extremely dangerous — you’d be shot if you went to the fence.
She crept up quietly and said, “Hallo, anybody there?” Then she heard a voice from across the fence, and by chance it was Auguste van Pels, one of the people who was in hiding with Anne’s family. She said almost casually, “Oh, you must be here for Anne,” and she brought Anne from the tent.
What were their last memories together?
Anne was coming from Auschwitz, so she was a broken shadow of her former self. She was freezing, starving and wailing that she was all alone in the world. She assumed that both of her parents were dead at this point. She didn’t know that just a week or two before, her father had been liberated from Auschwitz.
Imagine two girls on opposite sides of this fence — two very loved, coddled girls, who did not know deprivation, but now were completely in the throes of the worst days of the war, completely dehumanized and mistreated. There they were on opposite sides of this fence, best friends, sobbing.
Anne begged Hannah to bring her some food and Hannah said yes immediately, without knowing how she would get it. She said that she would come back in a couple of nights. And there was this amazing moment of female solidarity: The women in her barrack were so moved by the story of this reunion, they wanted to help — so from under a pillow here, hidden in a suitcase there, they gathered the little they had to give and put everything into a sock.
Out went Hannah again, a night or two later, to the fence. When she threw the sock over, she suddenly heard footsteps and then a scream — Anne had just lost the package to a fellow prisoner who took it out of her hands. She was distraught and couldn’t stop crying, but Hannah said, “Just stop crying, I’ll come back again with food.”
So she went back a few days later again with more food collected from her barrack. This time they triangulated better and Anne caught the package. That turned out to be the last time they ever met.
How did Hannah remember the end of the war?
At the very end of the war, the Germans forced everybody who could still walk at Bergen-Belsen onto a couple of different trains. These trains were meant to go to Theresienstadt, where they would be killed.
Hannah was put on a train with her little sister Gabi, whom she was trying to keep alive. It was a harrowing 13-day ride throughout the eastern German countryside. The people were very sick and starving, with no food or water for the journey. There was one especially awful moment when the man next to Hannah tried to spill his bowl of diarrhea outside the door of the train, but instead it splashed all over her.
She was so ill with typhus that she eventually passed out around day 13. When she woke up, people were already off the train. She asked what was going on, and someone said, “Don’t you know? We were liberated by the Russians.”
What did Pick-Goslar make of the tremendous legacy left by Frank’s diary? Did she feel that her friend was correctly understood?
For her, reading the diary was a revelation. She felt like she was sort of reunited with this old friend, which was a very powerful feeling, but also very sad. She saw a girl developing into a young woman whom she would still like to know. She was very grateful that Anne’s diary had been recovered, that so many people got to know her story, and that her diary became a gateway to learning more about the Holocaust.
I think she was a little upset by the sanitized version of Anne Frank. She spoke often about the famous passage in her diary, which is repeated and painted on walls and put on postcards: “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.” Hannah said that if Anne had survived the hell of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, she did not think she would stand by that statement anymore. I think she was concerned about some level of oversimplification.
She was very gratified that Anne’s voice never died and still lives on through her words, but she also wanted people to have a richer and more contextual understanding of the slaughter of millions of people that was the Holocaust.
—
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Jewish groups defend European media monitors banned for what State Dept. calls ‘censorship’
Two major Jewish groups defended a digital hate-speech researcher who has been barred by President Donald Trump’s administration from entering the country.
Representatives for Jewish Federations of North America and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs responded after the U.S. State Department restricted the visas of five European digital speech activists. The banned activists include two who helped Jewish college students sue the social network X over the proliferation of antisemitic content on the platform, and another who has advised Jewish federations on social media hygiene. The government made the announcement late Tuesday.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he was taking these steps in order to combat “censorship.”
“For far too long, ideologues in Europe have led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to punish American viewpoints they oppose,” Rubio wrote on X. “The Trump Administration will no longer tolerate these egregious acts of extraterritorial censorship.”
But representatives for JFNA and the JCPA, two groups that have worked extensively with the British digital researcher Imran Ahmed, stood up for him in interviews with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Ahmed, the group leaders said, is an important ally in the fight against antisemitism.
“He is a valuable partner in providing accurate and detailed information on how the social media algorithms have created a bent toward antisemitism and anti-Zionism, and he will remain a valuable partner,” Dennis Bernard, head of government relations for JFNA, told JTA about Ahmed.
Ahmed’s research has helped inform the federation movement’s larger strategy to counter antisemitism on social media. Last month JFNA and Ahmed’s group, the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, jointly released a report detailing how Instagram’s algorithm promotes antisemitism.
Ahmed also presented his findings at JFNA’s recent General Assembly in Washington, as well as at a Jewish Funders Network convening, and has spoken at the Eradicate Hate Global Summit in Pittsburgh — which was founded in the aftermath of the 2018 Tree of Life shootings. Separately, he has researched the proliferation of antisemitic content across various social networks following the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks.
Bernard declined to comment on Rubio’s move to restrict Ahmed’s visa, but noted, “We will look into this.” Regarding Ahmed, Bernard said, “If there’s something there we don’t know about, of course we will terminate our relationship with him.”
JCPA CEO Amy Spitalnick also praised Ahmed’s work fighting antisemitism. She harshly criticized the State Department’s targeting of him.
“He’s dedicated his career to fighting online hate and extremism,” Spitalnick told JTA about Ahmed. She denounced his targeting as “all part of the broader weaponization of the federal government to go after perceived political enemies and advance an extremist agenda, which in this case is to push back against any regulation of tech.”
Ahmed and Spitalnick began working together in the aftermath of Spitalnick’s successful effort to prosecute the organizers of the “Unite the Right” march in Charlottesville, Virginia. They bonded over a shared interest in how online spaces were giving rise to hate activities like the rally. They have since partnered on a report about antisemitism on X. Shortly after Oct. 7, Ahmed appeared in a webinar with Spitalnick discussing how extremist groups were seizing on the attacks to spread antisemitism and anti-Muslim sentiments.
Ahmed wasn’t the only target on the State Department’s list with connections to Jewish groups.
In 2023 the European Union of Jewish Students, a group representing pro-Israel Jewish university students throughout Europe, sued X, then called Twitter, in German court over the proliferation of antisemitic content, including Holocaust denial, on the social network. Filing alongside them was HateAid, a German legal group that says it “advocates for human rights in the digital space.”
HateAid’s leaders, Josephine Ballon and Anna-Lena von Hodenberg, were also named on the State Department’s list of visa restrictions this week.
“Twitter has betrayed our trust. By allowing hateful content to spread, the company fails to protect users, and Jews in particular,” Avital Grinberg, then the head of the European Union of Jewish Students, said about her lawsuit at the time. “If Jews are forced out of the virtual space due to antisemitism and digital violence, Jewish life will become invisible in a place that is relevant to society.”
“Twitter owes us a communication platform where we can move freely and without fear of hatred and agitation,” Ballon, the head of HateAid’s legal team, said then.
Anna-Lena von Hodenberg, founder of HateAid, attends the ceremony for the presentation of the 2021 ifa Award for the Dialogue of Cultures, at Allianz Forum in Berlin, Sept, 14, 2021. (Adam Berry/Getty Images)
Reached for comment Wednesday, Grinberg said the Trump administration’s move against HateAid’s leaders was “dangerous for people like us.”
“For me personally, and I think for many young Jews who are exposed to antisemitism online, these organizations are crucial,” she said. “These are people who give us tools to respond to the hatred we experience online every day, across all the platforms.”
Today Grinberg is general manager of EU Watch, a watchdog group that critiques the European Union from a pro-Israel perspective.
The individuals were targeted as part of a larger battle on the right to fight what conservatives see as an effort by tech activists to silence conservative voices — an effort that is clashing with institutional Jewish groups’ longstanding push for tougher restrictions on tech platforms to limit the spread of antisemitism and Holocaust denial.
In a statement explaining the restrictions, the State Department said the five activists had run afoul of a visa law passed earlier this year aimed at “foreign nationals who censor Americans.”
On X, Rubio said the administration “will take steps to bar leading figures of the global censorship-industrial complex from entering the United States. We stand ready and willing to expand this list if others do not reverse course.”
The U.S. crackdown on tech activists comes as antisemitism and other kinds of hate content have proliferated on American tech platforms, whose leaders — including some Jews like Instagram and Facebook owner Mark Zuckerberg — have largely cultivated warm relationships with President Trump since he reassumed power.
Regulators in Europe, where laws around Holocaust denial and other forms of hate speech are stricter than in the U.S., have sought to impose a stronger hand on tech platforms that operate on the continent. European regulators have particularly expressed concern about X, where antisemitism and Holocaust denial have become a particularly acute problem.
X is run by billionaire Elon Musk, who is both the world’s richest man and a onetime key Trump ally who played a prominent role in the early months of his administration. Though Musk and Trump have since appeared to have a falling-out, Musk has continued to promote right-wing ideas and Republican causes on X, and has also endorsed European far-right parties. He has long flirted with antisemitic ideas on the platform himself, and has regularly feuded with the Anti-Defamation League.
Sarah Rogers, U.S. undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, gave a more extensive rundown of the reasons behind each visa restriction on X (itself reposted by Musk).
HateAid, Rogers claimed, “routinely demands access to propriety [sic] social media platform data to help it censor more.” Rogers also singled out a remark Ballon had given on a 60 Minutes episode that she said the government found objectionable: “Free speech needs boundaries.”
Ahmed, according to Rogers, was a “key collaborator with the Biden Administration’s effort to weaponize the government against U.S. citizens.” She particularly took offense with the Centre for Countering Digital Hate’s focus on anti-vaccine rhetoric, which had included calls to deplatform Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who, among other things, has spread conspiracy theories linking Jews to COVID-19.
Today Kennedy is Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services. He praised the news of the visa restrictions on X, writing, “Once again, the United States is the mecca for freedom of speech!”
Imran Ahmed, CEO of the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, speaks at the Eradicate Hate summit in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Oct. 5, 2023. On Dec. 23, 2025, the US State Department barred Ahmed and four other European digital anti-hate advocates from entering the country. (Screenshot via YouTube)
Rogers, the State Department undersecretary, also invoked a term closely associated with antisemitism — the blood libel — in her justification for why another European figure, Clare Melford, also fell under the new visa restrictions.
Melford runs the Global Disinformation Index, a British nonprofit that says it seeks to counter online disinformation but has been accused by conservative groups of bias. The group has in the past spoken out about misinformation “linking Jews to the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
“If you question Canadian blood libels about residential schools, you’re engaging in ‘hate speech’ according to Melford and GDI,” Rogers wrote on X. She highlighted a description, purportedly from the group, referring to “digital denialism around residential schools.”
The passage highlighted by Rogers references Canada’s infamous residential school system, an effort to force cultural assimilation on the country’s Indigenous populations that resulted in the deaths of thousands of children and persisted for generations. Canada has issued formal apologies for residential schools, with a truth-and-reconciliation commission report concluding that they amounted to cultural genocide.
Conservative parties in Canada have questioned, downplayed or rejected accepted historical accounts of abuses under Canada’s residential school system.
The other European activist barred from the U.S. on Wednesday is Thierry Breton, a former European Union commissioner.
In a statement to JTA, HateAid blasted the decision to bar its leaders from the US as “an act of repression by a government that is increasingly disregarding the rule of law and trying to silence its critics by any means necessary.”
The group added, “We will not be intimidated by a government that uses accusations of censorship to silence those who stand up for human rights and freedom of expression. Despite the significant strain and restrictions placed on us and our families by US government measures, we will continue our work with all our strength — now more than ever.”
Grinberg, the Jewish former student who had sued X along with HateAid, wound up losing her case in German court. But the State Department’s latest moves against her allies, she said, may not amount to much in the end.
“It’s just a statement. Like, OK, two people cannot enter the US. It sucks for them. It sucks for democratic values and for the debating culture. But ultimately, I don’t see how Musk is particularly benefitting from that,” she said. “For me, it’s more a performative act.”
In early 2023, when they first sued Musk’s platform, “we thought antisemitism had never been as bad as it is now,” she said. “Now we see that it is even worse. But that’s why you need counterforces. You need people like them.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Jewish groups defend European media monitors banned for what State Dept. calls ‘censorship’ appeared first on The Forward.
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British police drop case against Bob Vylan for ‘Death to the IDF’ chant, sparking outrage from Jewish groups
British police ended an investigation into the British punk band Bob Vylan, months after the rap duo led thousands of Glastonbury music festival attendees in chants of “Death, death to the IDF.”
“We have concluded, after reviewing all the evidence, that it does not meet the criminal threshold outlined by the CPS for any person to be prosecuted,” wrote Avon and Somerset Police in a statement Tuesday. “No further action will be taken on the basis there is insufficient evidence for there to be a realistic prospect of conviction.”
Following the rap duo’s incendiary chant at Glastonbury, the pair were condemned Jewish leaders in the United Kingdom, and had their U.S. visas revoked by the State Department. In October, one of the band’s members, Bobby Vylan, doubled down on the anti-Israel chant in an interview with documentarian Louis Theroux.
“Simply because there is a high threshold for criminal conviction should in no way minimise the concerns raised by many sectors of society around the nature of the comments made,” the police statement continued.
In a post on X following the ruling, Bob Vylan argued that the criminal investigation into the chant “was never warranted in the first place.”
“We hope this news inspires others in the UK and around the world to speak up, in support of the Palestinian people, without fear,” the band wrote. “We have had our shows cancelled, visas revoked, our names tarnished and our lives upended, but what we have lost in peace and security we have gained tenfold in spirit and camaraderie.”
Bob Vylan’s chant at Glastonbury in June came months after the Irish rap group Kneecap kicked off a string of anti-Israel stunts by British musicians at the Coachella music festival in April. In September, terrorism charges against one of the band members, Liam O’Hanna, were also dropped.
The decision to drop the investigation into Bob Vylan was lambasted by Jewish groups in the United Kingdom, including the Community Security Trust, which cited the recent antisemitic terror attacks in Manchester, England and Sydney, Australia.
“It is deeply disappointing that vile calls for violence, repeated openly and without remorse, continue to fall on deaf ears,” the Community Security Trust told The Guardian. “Especially in the wake of the terror attacks in Manchester and Bondi, when will such calls finally be recognised for what they are: a real and dangerous instigator of bloodshed?”
Last week, police in London and Manchester announced that they would begin to arrest pro-Palestinian protesters who chant the slogan “globalize the intifada,” citing the Sydney attack on a Hanukkah event that killed 15.
“It is incredibly disappointing that the police and CPS have decided not to charge in this case, particularly when police forces in London and Manchester are adopting a stronger approach to tackling hateful rhetoric,” wrote the Embassy of Israel in London in a post on X. “It sends completely the wrong message at the worst possible time.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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A French Court Acquitted a Nanny Who Poisoned a Jewish Family of Antisemitism. Now Prosecutors Are Appealing.
Procession arrives at Place des Terreaux with a banner reading, “Against Antisemitism, for the Republic,” during the march against antisemitism, in Lyon, France, June 25, 2024. Photo: Romain Costaseca / Hans Lucas via Reuters Connect
Prosecutors in France have appealed a court ruling that convicted a nanny of poisoning the food of the Jewish family for whom she worked but cleared her of antisemitism charges, in the latest flashpoint as French authorities grapple with an ongoing nationwide surge in antisemitism.
On Tuesday, the public prosecutor’s office in Nanterre, just west of Paris, announced it had appealed a criminal court ruling that acquitted the family’s nanny of antisemitism-aggravated charges after she poisoned their food and drinks.
Last week, the 42-year-old Algerian woman was sentenced to two and a half years in prison for “administering a harmful substance that caused incapacitation for more than eight days.”
Residing illegally in France, the nanny had worked as a live-in caregiver for the family and their three children — aged two, five, and seven — since November 2023.
The French court declined to uphold any antisemitism charges against the defendant, noting that her incriminating statements were made several weeks after the incident and recorded by a police officer without a lawyer present
The family’s lawyers described the ruling as “incomprehensible,” insisting that “justice has not been served.”
The nanny, who has been living in France in violation of a deportation order issued in February 2024, was also convicted of using a forged document — a Belgian national identity card — and barred from entering France for five years.
First reported by Le Parisien, the shocking incident occurred in January last year, just two months after the caregiver was hired, when the mother discovered cleaning products in the wine she drank and suffered severe eye pain from using makeup remover contaminated with a toxic substance, prompting her to call the police.
After a series of forensic tests, investigators detected polyethylene glycol — a chemical commonly used in industrial and pharmaceutical products — along with other toxic substances in the food consumed by the family and their three children.
According to court documents, these chemicals were described as “harmful, even corrosive, and capable of causing serious injuries to the digestive tract.”
Even though the nanny initially denied the charges against her, she later confessed to police that she had poured a soapy lotion into the family’s food as a warning because “they were disrespecting her.”
“They have money and power, so I should never have worked for a Jewish woman — it only brought me trouble,” the nanny told the police. “I knew I could hurt them, but not enough to kill them.”
According to her lawyer, the nanny later withdrew her confession, arguing that jealousy and a perceived financial grievance were the main factors behind the attack.
At trial, the defendant described her statements as “hateful” but denied that her actions were driven by racism or antisemitism.
The appeal comes as France continues to face a steep rise in antisemitic incidents in the wake of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of and massacre across southern Israel.
In a disturbing new case, French authorities have also opened an investigation after a social media video went viral showing a man harassing a young Jewish child at a Paris airport, shouting “free Palestine” and calling him a “pig.”
Widely circulated online, the video shows a young boy playing a video game at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle Airport when a man approaches, grabs his toy, and begins verbally assaulting him.
“Are you gonna free Palestine, bro?” the man, who remains off-camera, yells at the boy.
“If you don’t free them, I’ll snatch your hat off, bro,” the assailant continues, referring to the child’s kippah.
ANTISEMITIC INCIDENT AT PARIS–CDG AIRPORT :
Wednesday, June 25, 2025, at around 7:00 a.m, in the PlayStation Zone
of Terminal 2B at Paris–Charles de Gaulle Airport, a man in his early 30s, speaking with a British accent
, verbally and physically targeted two… pic.twitter.com/8XY3ze0EYb
— SwordOfSalomon (@SwordOfSalomon) December 21, 2025
The man is also heard repeatedly telling the child, “Dance, pig,” while the confused and frightened boy is seen trying to comply
Local police confirmed that an investigation has been launched into the incident, classified as violence based on race, ethnicity, nationality, or religion, as authorities work to identify the individual and bring him to justice.
Paris police chief Patrice Faure expressed his “outrage at these unacceptable and intolerable remarks,” promising that the incident “will not go unpunished.”
Yonathan Arfi, president of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF) — the main representative body of French Jews — condemned the incident, calling it “yet another illustration of the climate of antisemitism that has prevailed in Europe” since the Hamas-led atrocities of Oct. 7, 2023.