French police detain Palestinian man who allegedly struck rabbi with a chair
Rabbi Elie Lemmel said he had never been assaulted before. Now it’s happened twice.
Rabbi Elie Lemmel addressed antisemitism in a recent YouTube video. Then he was attacked twice near Paris within days. (Screenshot)
(JTA) — French police detained a man originally from Gaza on Friday after a rabbi was attacked in a Paris suburb, capping a week of antisemitic incidents raising alarm among French Jews.
Rabbi Elie Lemmel was sitting at a cafe in the Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine Friday when he said he was hit in the head by someone wielding a chair. Earlier in the week, he had posted on social media that he had been punched in the stomach by an unknown assailant in the town of Deauville in Normandy, writing, “I received a blow and was insulted in a language I didn’t understand.”
Prior to the two incidents, the rabbi — who has thousands of followers on social media — said he had never been physically assaulted.
“Unfortunately, given my beard and my kippah, I suspected that was probably why, and it’s such a shame,” Lemmel told Reuters.
France is home to over 440,000 Jews, the most of any European country. According to data from the French Interior Ministry, the country saw 1,570 antisemitic acts in 2024, accounting for over half of the religion-based hate crimes in the country.
“This act disgusts us. I want to express our solidarity with him,” French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, whose father was Jewish, said in a post on X. “Antisemitism, like all hatred, is a deadly poison for our society. We will always fight it.”
A man being held for questioning at the Neuilly-sur-Seine police station was hospitalized following a psychiatric examination, according to the prosecutor’s office in Nanterre. The office said the 28-year-old man was born in the city of Rafah in the Gaza Strip, according to German-language documents found in his possession. France’s interior minister tweeted that he “had no business being in France.”
It was not clear whether the alleged attacker said anything during the incident.
The incident follows multiple attacks on Jewish targets in the United States by pro-Palestinian activists. Some in France tied the attack on Lemmel to the trend.
“To attack a rabbi is to attack the most visible face of the Jewish presence in society,” Arfi tweeted, adding, “Let us say it forcefully: nothing, not even solidarity with the Palestinians, will ever justify attacking a rabbi. Hatred of Israel has today become the fuel for hatred of Jews.”
The incident follows another attack on a rabbi in France in March in which the chief rabbi of the French city Orléans was physically assaulted and called antisemitic slurs while walking with his 9-year-old son on Shabbat. Earlier this week, multiple Jewish sites in Paris were vandalized with green paint, in what French Jews, international watchdogs and local authorities all said they viewed as an antisemitic attack.
