OSWIECIM (EJP)--- Poland’s chief rabbi Michael Schudrich said Sunday an attack on him in a Warsaw street was anti-Semitic and placed part of the blame on the entry of a far-right party into Poland’s coalition government.

"When you let a right-wing party into the coalition government, that
empowers nationalists and those who run around shouting unpleasant things," Schudrich told journalists shortly before he was due to say the Jewish prayer for the dead, the Kaddish, at a ceremony at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp.

The ceremony will be headed by Pope Benedict XVI, who was to say a prayer in German at the camp during the last event of his four-day visit to Poland.

More than 1.1 million people, mostly Jews, were killed by Hitler’s Germany during World War II at the camp, the biggest of the Nazis’ killing factories, many of which were set on Polish soil.

League of Polish families

The extreme-right League of Polish Families (LPR) early this month entered government alongside the conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party and the populist Samoobrona party.

LPR leader Roman Giertych, a third generation far-right activist, has been appointed deputy premier and education minister in the coalition.

Israel’s foreign ministry has said the Catholic party has "an anti-Semitic ideology".

Schudrich was roughed up in a Warsaw street at midday on Saturday.
"The rabbi, who was in the street, was suddenly pushed by a young man but he was not injured," Interior Ministry spokesman Tomasz Sklodowski told Agence France Presse earlier.

Sklodowski added that "the timing and the circumstances of the attack lead us to believe that it was a provocation of an anti-Semitic and anti-Polish character, aimed at showing Poland as an anti-Semitic country".

Polish Premier condemns attack

Polish Prime Minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz, of PiS, on Sunday joined a chorus of international officials who condemned the attack.

The Polish premier told Schudrich, a US citizen, in a phone conversation that he was "deeply shocked" by the attack, which he said was "all the more painful because it happened during the visit to Poland by Pope Benedict XVI", the prime minister’s spokesman Konrad Ciesiolkiewicz said.

The US and Israeli embassies have both condemned the attack, with US ambassador to Poland Victor Ashe saying it was an abhorrent act of bigotry.

"There is no place for bigotry and all who abhor such intolerance must join together to condemn it," Ashe said in a statement.

The US diplomat visited Schudrich at Warsaw’s Nozycka synagogue to express his sympathy.

Michal Sobelamn, spokesman for the Israeli embassy, said he regretted the attack and the fact that it happened during the pope’s visit.

"We are sorry it happened during the visit of the pope to Poland, and on the eve of his visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau," he said.

Anti-Semitic act

"This is an act of anti-Semitism but we don’t know if it is an isolated
individual act by a disturbed person, or by a group. I would tend toward the first hypothesis," said Sobelman.

Although Schudrich had earlier dismissed the attack as an isolated case by a "stupid" person, at Auschwitz he told journalists it was a blatantly anti-Semitic attack.

"There was no indication that I was Jewish apart from my cap and beard," he said ironically, explaining that it would have been easy for him to be picked out as Jewish.

"A young man approached me and insulted me. I reacted and he sprayed me with tear gas then fled. If I had not reacted, he probably wouldn’t have done anything," Schudrich had said earlier.

Witnesses including people accompanying Schudrich gave police a description of the attacker, and a composite image of the suspect has been drawn up, the ministry spokesman said.

Police have launched an inquiry into the incident.