Polish Man Gets House Arrest For Burning Jew In Effigy
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
A Polish man sentenced to prison for burning an effigy of a haredi Orthodox Jew said he will sue the leaders of the Wroclaw Jewish community for publicly naming him an anti-Semite.
Piotr Rybak burned the effigy during a 2015 demonstration in Wroclaw against accepting refugees in Poland. An appeals court reduced his prison sentence to three months after a Wroclaw court had sentenced him to 10 months. He later explained that it was meant to represent George Soros, the Hungarian-Jewish billionaire and philanthropist who has advocated for a common European asylum policy.
Rybak said he will name Aleksander Gleichgewicht and Rafał Dutkiewicz, the chairman and president, respectively, of the Wroclaw Jewish community in his lawsuit.
“With my lawyers we are already considering how to sue Dutkiewicz and Gleichgewicht, who called me a fascist, anti-Semite and stinking nationalist,” he said after leaving an appeals court Tuesday.
The appeals court ordered the Wroclaw court to reconsider his request to serve his penalty under house arrest with an electronic surveillance system after rejecting it.
This is a moment of great uncertainty. Here’s what you can do about it.
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news this Passover. All donations are being matched by the Forward Board - up to $100,000.
This is a moment of great uncertainty for the news media, for the Jewish people, and for our sacred democracy. It is a time of confusion and declining trust in public institutions. An era in which we need humans to report facts, conduct investigations that hold power to account, tell stories that matter and share honest discourse on all that divides us.
With no paywall or subscriptions, the Forward is entirely supported by readers like you. Every dollar you give this Passover is invested in the future of the Forward — and telling the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
The Forward doesn’t rely on funding from institutions like governments or your local Jewish federation. There are thousands of readers like you who give us $18 or $36 or $100 each month or year.
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
