The Israeli club said the assault occurred at a stadium after the game finished, when most of the players had returned to their hotel. (Source: File)
Masked soccer hooligans attacked staff members traveling with an Israeli soccer team following a friendly match in Poland, in what the Israeli Embassy said Thursday was an “anti-Semitic incident.”
Two men were slightly injured in the attack, which occurred Wednesday evening in Suchocin, a town near Warsaw, following a friendly between the Israeli club Hapoel Petah Tikva and a local Polish club, MKS Ciechanow.
The Israeli club said the assault occurred at a stadium after the game finished, when most of the players had returned to their hotel.
It said a number of fans of Legia Warszawa, a Warsaw club, “emerged from the adjacent forest with their faces covered (and) came on the field and began assaulting a number of staff that had stayed behind.”
The Israeli Embassy in Warsaw said it was “shocked and sadden by the news of another anti-Semitic incident.”
Poland was home to the largest Jewish community in Europe before the Holocaust. Although the Jewish population today is very small, anti-Semitic incidents occur from time to time.
In one high-profile incident a Polish nationalist burned the effigy of an Orthodox Jew during an anti-migrant rally in Wroclaw in 2015.
