Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

‘Jews Want To Destroy Whites’: French Jewish Mayor’s Home Vandalized

(JTA) — The home of a Jewish mayor in France was covered with anti-Semitic graffiti and, in a separate incident, headstones in a Jewish cemetery in Germany were toppled over and smashed.

The graffiti were spray painted on Friday, which marked the the 80th anniversary of the Kristallnacht pogroms by the Nazis against German and Austrian Jews, on the home of Etienne Wolf, mayor of Brumath near Strasbourg in France’s east, France3 reported. Police have no suspects in custody in connection with this action.

The graffiti included “Mayor Marx = Jude,” a reference to the communist ideologue Karl Marx followed by the German-language word for “Jew.” Several swastikas also were painted, along with the words: “Dirty Jew, get out.” Another tag read: “Jews want to destroy Whites.”

Wolf, who is Jewish, discovered the tags early in the morning when he came out to get his newspaper. “It stunned me. I wondered what I had done to deserve this,” Wolf, whose town has approximately 10,000 residents, told France3.

In September, in the eastern town of Zoebersdorf, located 15 miles northwest of Strasbourg, unidentified individuals wrote similar tags that read: “Marx dirty Jews, immigrants out” on the headquarters of the Town Council.

In recent weeks, public buildings were similarly defaced in other towns in the Alsatian region of Bas-Rhin, including in Thal-Marmoutier, Bremmelbach, Mollkirch and Langensoultzbach.

The cemetery incident occurred last month in Holzminden, a town of about 20,000 residents located in southern Lower Saxony, Germany.  The unidentified culprits toppled four headstones, smashing two of them, at the cemetery, the Weser-ith News website reported last week.

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.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.