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Poland's Jewish community sets up anti-Semitism database

Updated: 23/Jun/2006 15:02

Michael Schudrich, Chief Rabbi of Poland

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WARSAW (AFP)--- Poland's Jewish community is to set up a database listing incidents of anti-Semitism, which have been on the rise in the EU member state in recent months, a Jewish official said Thursday.

"We have launched this initiative after the recent attack in Warsaw against the chief rabbi of Poland and also after members of our community have received threatening mobile phone text messages," Piotr Kadlcik, head of the Jewish community in Poland, told Agence France Presse.

Around 20 messages have already been received since the launch of the operation named "Magen" -- Hebrew for "shield" -- was announced.

"We carefully check each case before we alert the police," Kadlcik said.

Poland's Grand Rabbi Michael Schudrich was insulted and sprayed with tear gas in a street in Warsaw in late May, the day before he was due to say the Jewish prayer for the dead, the Kaddish, at a ceremony led by Pope Benedict XVI at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in southern Poland.

Schudrich placed part of the blame for the attack on the entry of a far-right party into Poland's coalition government, saying it "empowers nationalists and those who run around shouting unpleasant things."

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Early this month, Polish police arrested two people linked to a neo-Nazi website and charged eight others with collaborating on the site, police officer Pawel Biedziak said.

Kadlcik said Poland, where the Jewish community numbers around 5,000, was "thankfully not yet at the same level of violence as in Germany or France," but urged the Jewish and other communities not to let down their guard against anti-Semitism.

"You could say we have minor anti-Semitism, but you have to stand up to that, too," he said.

The Polish authorities had asked the United States for help in closing down the www.redwatch.info website, which posted so-called blacklists of homosexuals, prominent members of the Jewish community and left-wing activists.

The authorities in Poland said the site was hosted by a US-based server and outside the jurisdiction of the Polish legal system. The website was still up and running Thursday, when AFP checked.

Poland's thriving pre-WWII Jewish community of more than three million people was almost entirely eradicated by the Nazis in the Holocaust.

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