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 go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.
If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
