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As trial begins in Tree of Life massacre, Pittsburgh’s Jews struggle with what to reveal and what to conceal
PITTSBURGH (JTA) — On Friday afternoon, Squirrel Hill was suffused with spring breezes and pink dogwoods, and alive with the movement that typifies the coming of Shabbat.
Toddlers scrambled up the jungle gym in the JCC playground, while the chatter in cafes was about a looming storm that could soak the walk to synagogue on Saturday. Murray Avenue Kosher was emptying out of challahs.
Barely present, at least on the surface, was any indication that Monday morning would hold a turning point in the community’s greatest trauma. That’s when jury selection was to begin in the trial of the man accused of shattering Shabbat on Oct. 27, 2018, with gunfire. His massacre of 11 worshipers, in a synagogue building a 10-minute stroll from the downtown of this leafy, heavily Jewish neighborhood, was the deadliest-ever attack on U.S. Jews.
But behind the scenes, there are clear signs that the trial’s proximity is being felt. Maggie Feinstein, the director of the 10/27 Healing Partnership, which provides post-traumatic therapy for the community, said that as the trial nears, requests for treatment have spiked.
“The trauma cues that for a while bothered us right after the shooting — for some people it might be ambulances, for other people it might be media, for some people it might be the sound of multiple police cars — you get to a place where they don’t bother you as much,” she said. “But the increased media attention and the increased awareness of this upcoming trial for a number of people is bringing back for them that maybe they didn’t do their own healing the first time around.”
A Starbucks in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh is decorated with a memorial for the victims of the 2018 massacre at the city’s Tree of Life synagogue, April 21, 2023. (Ron Kampeas)
There were three congregations in the building: Tree of Life and New Light, both affiliated with the Conservative movement, and Dor Hadash, which is Reconstructionist.
The 11 victims were brothers Cecil and David Rosenthal, couple Bernice and Sylvan Simon, Rose Malinger, Joyce Fienberg, Richard Gottfried, Jerry Rabinowitz, Daniel Stein, Melvin Wax and Irving Younger. Seven were from Tree of Life, three were from New Light and one was from Dor Hadash.
For their families, their friends, their congregations and their broader Jewish community, the legacy of the massacre is a deep-seated longing for control, a longing to never have to think again of the gunman and of the anguish he left in his wake, while grappling with tender memories of the dead, of the decades spent in celebration and in prayer in the building.
Who narrates this story, the gunman or his victims? That struggle now looms as the alleged gunman goes to trial. The community is wrestling with questions such as where and whether to put the bullet-riddled artifacts, whether to worship at the site, whether to even speak of the massacre and how and whether the gunman lives or dies.
”We believe strongly that this antisemitic attack should not stop people from practicing and being Jewish,” Feinsten said. “For a lot of people, that’s an active choice that they have to work at. It doesn’t come easily after feeling unsafe in that environment to then work to find safety in it. But a lot of people have chosen to do that.”
On Friday, Feinstein was organizing support services for families who would, if they so choose, be sequestered in a separate room in the court where they could view the trial. (Family members may also ask to be seated in the courtroom.) She assigned six therapists to be present with the families.
Compounding the revisited trauma of the event, the families are divided over whether the gunman, should he be convicted, deserves the death penalty. The accused has a lawyer, Judy Clarke, known as “the attorney for the damned” for her determination to keep her clients from execution.
What’s clear is that the Jews of Squirrel Hill are taking the trial on with their characteristic spirit of collaboration. The community has hired public relations specialists to handle media inquiries ahead of the trial, in part to safeguard locals from being pressed to answer questions that could harm them or shatter the sense of unity. Congregants reached by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency dutifully deferred to the list of approved contacts on a list distributed by a PR agency.
On Friday afternoon, signs of unity that flooded the city in the immediate aftermath of the shooting were still visible. In a tobacconist’s window a sign with the slogan “No place for hate/Stronger than hate,” which had proliferated throughout the neighborhood after the attack, remained propped up next to a flag and an ad for the lottery. A Starbucks had on its window white paint drawings depicting “love,” “kindness” and “hope” in English and in Hebrew, alongside symbols: the Star of David, a heart and a dove.
A tobacconist window includes a poster of the “No Place for Hate” slogan that proliferated after the Tree of Life Massacre in 2018, in Pittsburgh, April 21, 2023. (Ron Kampeas)
Representatives of the community talk about “doing Jewish” as a means of coping, including redoubling the very activities — allying with the city’s Black minority and advocating for immigration, refugees and gun control — that fueled the rage of the alleged attacker.
The attacker allegedly was driven in part by the partnership between Dor Hadash and HIAS, the Jewish refugee aid group, and the congregation’s sponsorship of refugee families.
“We have, if anything, doubled down on our commitment to immigrants and refugees,” said Dana Kellerman, the chair of the communications committee at Dor Hadash. “We are currently coming up on the end of our first year working with a new resettlement program to resettle a Congolese immigrant family in Pittsburgh, and we have every intention of when the year commitment is up of working with a second family.”
Kellerman said the shooting had “honestly become part of the background of our existence at this point.” In keeping with her congregation’s rules aimed at protecting their community, Kellerman declined to talk about the day of the massacre, the death penalty or about details of the trial. But she was open about the ways in which her congregation has leaned into the values it has long held, and that the gunman so reviled.
“We have become louder and more public about practicing our Judaism,” she said. Now, she said, the congregation incorporates advocacy for refugees into its service, with liturgical readings on immigration.
There are other changes. “We even have hats now! We have baseball caps!” Kellerman said with a smile, unearthing a photo of herself in a white cap with “Dor Hadash” and a stylized Magen David in blue, standing alongside gun control advocates.
“Previously we all would have shown up as our individual selves, and now we show up in our Dor Hadash baseball caps,” she said. “Mine kept blowing off.”
Steve Cohen, the co-president of New Light, said the congregation’s relationship with Black churches in the city has reached new intensity since the massacre. The congregation’s rabbi and congregants who know Hebrew partner with the churches to analyze sacred texts in the original.
“We would bring our Tanachs [Hebrew Bibles], and the Christian congregation would bring their Bible and then we would talk about the Proverbs and go through it, not just what the intention of the author was, but how different ways the same words can be translated in order to imply different things,” he said. “And so we went through the whole Book of Proverbs with the Rodman Street Baptist Church, and this past winter, we did the selected Psalms with the faith and Destiny Church on the north side.”
The interior of the new sanctuary of the New Light congregation, four and half years after a gunman massacred three of its congregants, in Pittsburgh, April 21, 2023. (Ron Kampeas)
New Light took its cue from survivors of the 2015 attack on the Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in which a white supremacist murdered nine Black worshipers, Cohen said. Leaders of New Light traveled to the church and heard from its elders that it was not enough to tend to the traumatized individuals, but to the community; they emphasized outreach, bringing congregants back in.
“That’s a lot of the reason why we have an outpouring of members who never attended shul now attending shul,” he said.
Feinstein, too, said she had an intensification of religious and ritual observance among her clients: more frequent attendance at Shabbat services, forming a daily minyan, finding a study partner for daily Talmud study.
Kellerman said the community has become closer; she sees it in congregants who linger. “It shows up in things like people showing up for Friday night services, and hanging out to chat or getting on a little early to chat,” she said.
A rendition of architect Daniel Libeskind’s plans for the interior of the new Tree of Life synagogue. (Tree of Life)
In the days leading up to the trial, the community bid farewell to the most salient relic of that painful day: the hulking synagogue building on the corner of Wilkins and Shady that has stood empty since then. All three congregations have decamped to nearby synagogues, leaving behind the chain-link fence draped with paintings from children across the country wishing for strength.
“Nobody has been meeting in the synagogue since the day of the shooting,” said Carole Zawatsky, the Tree of Life CEO who is overseeing the plans to replace the building. The only people to have been inside at all, she said, were survivors and “special friends” — donors to the rebuilding and politicians.
Zawatsky said it is wrenching to even contemplate returning for some. “You can walk through the building and see where the gunman was destructive,” she said. “You can see where the gunman was apprehended, where the gunman opened fire. It’s devastating to witness.”
But some intend to: Tree of Life lost seven congregants but plans on returning once the building is rebuilt as a museum and education center focused on the dangers of extremism.
On Sunday, the Tree of Life congregation had an outdoor ceremony to say “L’hitraot,” Hebrew for “until we meet again,” to the building as it has existed up to now.
“We are grateful to God for the thousands of blessings that have passed through these doors,” Rabbi Jeffrey Myers, the rabbi who sheltered congregants and alerted police, said at the ceremony. “We cannot, we must not, permit one day … to define us, nor outweigh all the good.”
The new center is being designed by Daniel Libeskind, the architect who designed the master plan for the World Trade Center site reconstruction in New York and the Jewish Museum in Berlin.
But Dor Hadash and New Light decided their moves were permanent in part because families of their victims swore never to return to the building.
New Light is now ensconced in what once was a secondary chapel at the Beth Shalom synagogue, as if it has been there for decades: Plaques honoring past donors and presidents adorn the walls of the sanctuary. The only signs of the massacre are the 1,000 paper cranes Pittsburgh’s Japanese community gave the congregation, reflecting a Japanese tradition that folding cranes will make a wish come true. They hang at the entrance to the sanctuary, unexplained by any plaque. There is a stained glass monument to the three victims at the cemetery where they are buried.
Even with Tree of Life’s commitment to return, many questions remain about what that will look like. The congregation has yet to decide what objects will stay in the sanctuary, what will stay in storage and what will be part of a separate exhibit, Zawatsky said.
“The first work that’s had to be done for the synagogue is ‘What are the things that need to be saved and go into storage during construction?’” she said.
In some ways, she indicated, the work of rebuilding could bear some resemblance to the balancing act that the community will have to navigate during the alleged shooter’s trial.
“We are thinking deeply about how you exhibit some of these materials,” Zaslavsky said, “in ways that are both teachable moments and don’t retraumatize.”
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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.