(JTA) — Two teenagers beat an 8-year-old Jewish boy in suburban Paris in what French prosecutors are calling an anti-Semitic attack.
The boy was wearing a kippah while walking to a tutor on Tuesday afternoon in Sarcelles when the assailants, about 15 years old, knocked him to the ground and beat him, the French news agency AFP reported.
It is the second attack on a Jewish child in the same area this month. On Jan. 10, a 15-year-old Jewish girl was slashed in the face while walking home from her private Jewish school wearing its uniform.
French President Emmanuel Macron condemned the incident Tuesday night on Twitter.
“An 8-year-old boy was attacked today in Sarcelles. Because he was wearing a kippa. Every time a citizen is attacked because of his age, his appearance or his religion, the whole country is being attacked,” Macron tweeted.
He added: “And it is the whole country that stands, especially today, alongside the French Jews to fight each of these despicable acts, with them and for them.”
Interior Minister Gerard Collomb said in a statement late Tuesday that investigators suspect the incident was motivated by anti-Semitism.
Earlier in January, two kosher shops in Creteil, another suburb of Paris, were torched two weeks after the same shops were attacked by individuals who painted swastikas on their facades.
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