Swiss synagogue has window smashed with hammer

The incident won’t stop the community from holding its public Hanukkah candle-lighting, the rabbi at the Basel synagogue said.

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(JTA) — A window of a synagogue in Basel, Switzerland, was smashed in with a hammer.

The damage was discovered Saturday morning as worshippers gathered for the Shabbat morning service at the Chabad Lubavitch shul, the BZ Basel news website reported.

“I’ve been living in Basel for 16 years. It’s the first time that I have been worried about myself and my family,” Rabbi Zalmen Wishedski of Chabad Lubavitch told BZ Basel.

Still, Wishedski said that Chabad will not cancel its public Hanukkah candle-lighting ceremony scheduled for Tuesday in the market square.

“The attackers want to intimidate us,” he told BZ Basel, “but they will not succeed.”

There are no suspects, the Basel public prosecutor’s office told the news website.

The incident comes after a kosher butcher shop in Basel was vandalized four times in one month in what local Jews have condemned as an anti-Semitic campaign of intimidation.

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