Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

Two officers stabbed outside Grand Synagogue in Tunisia

The attacker had previously served jail time in a terrorism case

(JTA) – Two policemen standing guard at the Grand Synagogue in the center of the Tunisian capital of Tunis were stabbed on Thursday. 

It is not clear whether anyone was in the synagogue at the time of the attack, AFP reported.

The suspect, who was imprisoned in 2021 over a terrorism case and has since been released, wounded the officers but was overpowered. 

Interior ministry spokesman Fakher Bouzghaya told AFP that an investigation was underway. 

While the country’s current Jewish population is estimated at around a thousand, Tunisia once had a booming Jewish community of around 100,000. The population started dwindling after the nation won independence from France in 1956 and state-tolerated violence against Jews proliferated following Israel’s victory over its neighbors in the 1967 Six-Day War. 

The African country also hosts an annual pilgrimage to El Ghriba Synagogue in Riadh, a centuries-old synagogue in an island town where thousands of Jews once lived. Al-Qaeda terrorists set off an explosion outside the El Ghriba Synagogue in 2002, killing 20 people, including 14 German tourists.

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.