A Jewish leader in Antwerp has said the community feels “fragile” after a Charedi man was stabbed on his way to synagogue this weekend.
Yehosha Malik, 31, was attacked by a man who reportedly targeted his victim after exiting a bar early on Saturday morning.
While his assailant has not yet been identified by local police, the wound sustained by Mr Malik was just a centimetre deep, meaning he could leave hospital later that day.
Eli Ringer, honorary chairman of the Forum of Jewish Organisations in Antwerp, said: “The Jewish community is fragile here. There is an unpleasant feeling, and has been for the last few months.
“People come from certain parts of the world where they don’t like Israel or Jews, and they import their conflict. It's very dangerous and threatening to the Jewish community.”
Mr Ringer added that although nothing has been confirmed, he thought the assault was probably antisemitic: “The presumption is that as the young man was studying to become a rabbi and didn’t do anything, and his attacker didn’t know him, the chances are big that it was antisemitic.”
The Jewish community in the city, which is home to around 20,000 Jews, has requested local police to supply more protection and a larger presence in order to stop future attacks.
However, Maty Franco of the Coordinating Committee of Jewish Organisations in Belgium said that the assault “was not antisemitic aggression; it was a guy who was drunk and went out of a bar, had an altercation, and he stabbed the guy. The police said it was an isolated case, not antisemitic.”
The attack comes after a terrorist attack in May which resulted in the deaths of four people visiting the Jewish Museum in Brussels. Frenchman Mehdi Nemmouche, 29, shot dead an Israeli couple, a French woman and a Belgian.
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