Tens of thousands of French people march in Paris to protest against antisemitism. Photo: Screenshot

A French rabbi was attacked on Friday for the second time in a week, reflecting a rise in antisemitic hate crimes across France including high-profile assaults.

Elie Lemmel told Reuters he was sitting at a cafe in the Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine on Friday when he was hit in the head by a chair.

“I found myself on the ground, I immediately felt blood flowing,” he said.

He was stunned and unsure what exactly had happened, he said, initially thinking something must have fallen from a window or roof, before it occurred to him he had been attacked.

“Unfortunately, given my beard and my kippah, I suspected that was probably why, and it’s such a shame,” he said.

Friday’s incident follows another in the town of Deauville in Normandy last week, when Lemmel said he was punched in the stomach by an unknown assailant.

Lemmel said he was used to “not-so-friendly looks, some unpleasant words, people passing by, spitting on the ground,” but had never been physically assaulted before the two attacks.

The prosecutor’s office in Nanterre said it had opened an investigation into the Neuilly attack for aggravated violence and that a person was being held for questioning. It said it could not provide further details.

“This act sickens us,” former Prime Minister Gabriel Attal wrote on X regarding Friday’s incident involving Lemmel. “Antisemitism, like all forms of hatred, is a deadly poison for our society.”

Last weekend, five Jewish institutions in Paris — the Holocaust Memorial, three synagogues, and a Jewish restaurant — were vandalized with green paint.

In a separate incident last Saturday, a 21-year-old man was arrested after climbing a synagogue in the town of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine in north-central France, removing an Israeli flag from its façade, and attempting to set it on fire.

Then on Monday, an elementary school in Lyon, east-central France, was set on fire and defaced with antisemitic and pro-Palestinian slogans, as well as swastikas.

“I condemn in the strongest possible terms the antisemitic attack that targeted a rabbi in Neuilly today. Attacking a person because of their faith is a shame. The increase in anti-religious acts requires the mobilization of everyone,” Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau said in a post on X on Friday.

Antisemitism skyrocketed in France following the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, amid the ensuing war in Gaza.

Antisemitic incidents targeting French Jews continued to surge to alarming levels across the country last year, with 1,570 incidents recorded, according to a report by the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF) – the main representative body of French Jews.

The total number of antisemitic outrages in 2024 was a slight dip from 2023’s record total of 1,676, but it marked a striking increase from the 436 antisemitic acts recorded in 2022.

Anti-Jewish outrages have continued this year, with no sign of abating. In March, for example, Arie Engelberg, the rabbi of Orléans, was violently attacked while walking home with his nine-year-old son from the synagogue in the city, located south of Paris. There have also been multiple high-profile incidents of Jewish mean wearing kippahs and Stars of David being brutally attacked and called a “dirty Jew.”