Top Polish leaders celebrate Hanukkah in parliament after antisemitic incident

WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Top Polish leaders joined members of the Jewish community for a Hanukkah celebration in parliament Thursday after a far-right lawmaker used a fire extinguisher to put out burning candles on a menorah earlier this week.

The attendance of the president, speaker of parliament and other top legislative officials sent the message that there is no tolerance in Poland for the kind of antisemitic behavior that erupted in parliament halls Tuesday, shocking the country and drawing widespread condemnation across the political spectrum. A woman was injured in the incident and was still in a hospital two days later.

Rabbi Shalom Ber Stambler of the Chabad community, who has organized the Hanukkah event in parliament for the 17th straight year, told those gathered that the candle lighting symbolized a celebration of tolerance and freedom of religion.

“We will dispel darkness through light, and we are lucky that a little light can dispel a lot of darkness,” Stambler said.

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President Andrzej Duda stood by a large menorah as the parliament speaker, Szymon Holownia, lit a candle, with other Jewish community members lighting the others on the eighth and last night of the Jewish festival of lights.

Duda and Holownia are among the highest leaders in Poland. The other top leader, Prime Minister Donald Tusk, was in Brussels for a European Union summit. He also strongly denounced the earlier antisemitic incident.

“Something terrible happened but the reaction of the overwhelming majority of the country is that there is no place for this in Poland today,” the country’s U.S.-born chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich, told The Associated Press after the ceremony. “That’s the real face of Poland today.”

Grzegorz Braun is a lawmaker on the extreme right fringe who is considered one of the most controversial officials in Poland. On Tuesday he grabbed a red fire extinguisher and extinguished candles on a menorah that were lit for the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah, creating disruption and scandal as a new pro-EU government was beginning its work. A Jewish community member who tried to stop him, and he reacted by spraying her with the extinguisher chemical.

Braun, a member of the Confederation party, has in the past falsely claimed there is a plot to turn Poland into a “Jewish state.” In May, he violently disrupted a lecture by a Holocaust scholar, Jan Grabowski, at the German Historical Institute in Warsaw in May, grabbing his microphone from him and banging it on the lectern before banging on a loudspeaker.

He was banned from the parliament building on Thursday.

Poland was once home to a large Jewish community that numbered nearly 3.5 million on the eve of the Holocaust. Almost all of Poland’s Jews were murdered by the Nazi German forces that occupied Poland in World War II.