Unknown vandals desecrated the monument to the heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, near the Jewish Museum in the Polish capital.
The vandals threw red paint on the monument symbolizing Jewish heroism during the Holocaust. The Warsaw police have opened an investigation to try to identify who defaced the famous monument. The Israeli ambassador to Poland, Dr. Yaakov Livne, issued a statement condemning the incident and calling on the Polish authorities to condemn the event, apprehend the culprits and bring them to justice.
"Last night the monument to the heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was vandalized. I call on the Polish authorities to condemn this, to find the perpetrators, and bring them to justice. Sadly, this is not the first act of antisemitic vandalism in Warsaw. Only determined enforcement will put an end to it,'' wrote the ambassador. The desecration of the monument joins a number of incidents with antisemitic backgrounds that have occurred in recent months in Poland.
Last month, an anonymous party hung a 'Gas the Jews' sign on the fence of the Jagiellonian University's Philosophy Department in the center of Krakow. In May of last year, a Molotov cocktail was thrown at the Nozyk Synagogue in Warsaw, and in December of last year, Gzegorz Braun, a member of parliament from the right-wing Confederation Party, extinguished the menorah that Chabad had lit in the parliament in Warsaw.