Rabbi Yossi Bodenheim, the Jewish Chaplain for Scottish universities, was attacked, along with his family in Edinburgh.
Rabbi Bodenheim was walking with his wife and children when a woman shoved his wife and grabbed his kippah off of his head and threw it on the ground.
“My wife and I took our four young children for a walk in this beautiful city,” Rabbi Bodenheim told members of the Scottish Parliament, which is located less than a mile away fro where the attack took place.
“But as we were walking, a woman pushed my wife aside, grabbed my kippah, threw it on the ground and ran away. That took place less than a mile from here. Right in front of my young children. You can imagine the kind of distress they were in.”
A study funded by the Scottish government found last month that one out of every six Jews in Scotland conceals their Jewish identity for fear of anti-Semitism.
Nicola Livingston, Chair of the Jewish Student Chaplaincy Scotland, said that the incident highlights how anti-Semitism and anti-Semitic incidents have increased recently in Scotland. "I know the family were quite traumatized, it’s quite a difficult thing to speak about publicly, you don’t want to be seen as too vulnerable," she said. “The Scottish Government needs to condemn such incidents when they happen, and that’s why Yossi used the opportunity to speak to MSPs.”