Antwerp on alert after knife attack

A JEWISH leader in Antwerp has said the community feels “fragile” after a Charedi man was stabbed on his way to synagogue.

Yehosha Malik, 31, was attacked by a man reportedly leaving a bar early on Saturday morning.

The stab wound was just a centimetre deep, meaning he could leave hospital later that day.

Police have now launched a manhunt for the assailant, who has not yet been identified.

Eli Ringer, honorary chairman of the Forum of Jewish Organisations in Antwerp, said: “The Jewish community is fragile here. There is an unpleasant feeling, and has been for the past few months.

“People come from certain parts of the world where they don’t like Israel or Jews, and they import their conflict. It’s very dangerous and threatening to the Jewish community.”

Leaders of the city’s Jewish commu- nity, which numbers around 20,000, have asked local police for more protection.

Mr Ringer added that although nothing had been confirmed, he thought the assault was likely to have been antisemitic: “The presumption is that as the young man was studying to become a rabbi and didn’t do anything, and his attacker didn’t know him. The chances are big that it was antisemitic.”

However, Maty Franco, of the Coordinating Committee of Jewish Organisations in Belgium, said that the assault “was not antisemitic aggression; it was a guy who was drunk and went out of a bar, had an altercation, and he stabbed the guy. The police said it was an isolated case, not antisemitic”.

The attack comes after a French jihadi murdered four people visiting the Jewish Museum in Brussels in May. Mehdi Nemmouche, 29, shot dead an Israeli couple, a French woman and a Belgian man.