Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Far-Right Pole Burns Poster of Mayor Wearing Kippah

— A Polish ultra-nationalist burned a poster of the mayor of Wroclaw wearing a kippah during a protest march.

Roman Zielinski, a far-right agitator who authored a book titled “How I fell in love with Adolf Hitler,” set the poster of Mayor Rafał Dutkiewicz on fire in front of cameras on Sunday during a march against the European Union in Wroclaw, in western Poland, the PAP news agency reported Monday.

It was not reported whether the mayor was actually wearing the kippah or if it was superimposed on the poster.

The march was organized by the National Radical Camp, or ONR, a formation that was banned in the mid-1930s on account of its extremism but reactivated in 1993. Zielinski is a figurehead of a faction of fans of local football team Sląsk Wrocław.

In March, Polish prosecutors indicted for incitement a construction contractor from Wroclaw who burned an effigy of a Jew at a protest rally against Muslim immigration.

Piotr Rybak, an entrepreneur from Wroclaw, was filmed burning a haredi Jew’s effigy in November at a rally of  200 people who gathered to protest EU requirements that Poland accept refugees from Syria and Iraq. Rybak is accused of incitement to hatred against a faith or ethnic group.

Jonny Daniels, the London-born founder of From the Depths, an organization promoting Holocaust commemoration in Poland, called Zielinski “a disgusting deplorable act by utter scum” on Facebook.

But, noting the spiraling debate in his native country about the anti-Semitism problem of the British Labour party, Daniels warned against allowing such cases to “paint a whole country as anti-Semites.”

Poland, he wrote on Facebook Tuesday, “has its fair share of idiots, but it’s certainly not the ‘elites’ like it is in the UK” where some from Labor “are calling for more than burning of pictures.”

Daniels was referring to British Member of Parliament Naz Shah, who in 2014 called for transferring Jews from Israel to the United States. She was suspended by the party from her position last week as part of an internal purge against individuals tied to anti-Semitic speech in the party’s ranks.

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.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

With your support, we’ll be ready for whatever 2025 brings.

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.