Man Brandishes Weapon At French Holocaust Museum, Held In Psychiatric Facility
Is This Living? French police guard synagogue in city of Bordeaux. Image by getty images
(JTA) — A 20-year-old man who brandished a weapon at a Holocaust museum in western France was hospitalized at a psychiatric institution.
The man shouted and waved around an unloaded rifle Tuesday at the Memorial for the Deported Museum in Mayenne, Le Parisien reported Friday.
The man used the weapon, a hunting rifle, to threaten an employee at the entrance to the small museum, according to the report. Sources at the regional prosecutors’ office told the newspaper they estimate the man was not “responsible for his actions” at the time of the incident on Tuesday at around 3 p.m.
Security personnel overpowered the man. Police found anti-Semitic literature in his backpack, including Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, “Understanding the Empire” by the far-right Holocaust denier Alain Soral, and “The Jewish Psychoanalysis” by Herve Ryssen.
Prosecutors also said the man was a “nationalist” with a history of mental illness that has landed him at psychiatric hospitals twice in the past few years, most recently in 2017.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
