WARSAW (AFP)--- Polish President Lech Kaczynski vowed "zero tolerance" for anti-Semitism as he received the country’s chief rabbi, who was attacked last Saturday in the center of Warsaw.

Rabbi Michael Schudrich was pushed and sprayed with tear gas on a Warsaw street on Saturday by a young man, who then ran away.

"It is very important that the president is taking this incident so
seriously, proclaiming zero tolerance for anti-Semitism," Schudrich said after the meeting.

"President Kaczynski has always said that he would not tolerate any kind of anti-Semitic incident in Poland," said presidential aide Ewa Junczyk-Ziomecka.

Schudrich, who prayed alongside Pope Benedict XVI at the former Nazi death camp on Sunday, linked the aggression against him to recent changes in the Polish government.

The nationalist League of Polish Families (LPR) has entered the governing conservative coalition.

"When you let an extreme right-wing party into the coalition government, that empowers nationalists and those who run around shouting unpleasant things," the rabbi told journalists at the former death camp.

The head of the Jewish community in Poland, Piotr Kaldcik, confirmed on the TVP television channel on Monday that there had been an intensification in threats and insults sent to Polish Jews via anonymous text messages on their mobile phones.

“We used to get up to 10 a year before," he said, "now it’s more like 10 a week".

Following the attack on Schudrich, Warsaw has asked the US authorities to help it shut down a neo-Nazi website known for publishing blacklists of homosexuals and left-wing figures in Poland.

The government says Polish justice cannot close down the site,
www.redwatch.info, which is linked to the Polish branch of the international Blood and Honor organisation, because it is hosted by a US server.