For 2nd time in a month, Barcelona synagogue vandalized with anti-Israel graffiti

Perpetrators write ‘Why are they killing Palestinians’ outside Chabad center; follows a similar incident in another shul on Israel’s Holocaust Memorial Day

By Canaan Lidor 26 April 2023, 11:31 pm Edit

Canaan Lidor is a former Jewish World reporter at The Times of Israel

Antisemitic graffiti on Barcelona’s Maimonides Synagogue, April 17, 2023. (Courtesy European Jewish Congress)

For the second time this month, unidentified individuals sprayed pro-Palestinian graffiti at a synagogue in Barcelona.

The latest incident Wednesday, Israel’s Independence Day, was at the Chabad synagogue of the coastal city in eastern Spain. The graffiti on the sidewalk at the entrance to the synagogue read: “Why are they killing Palestinians.”

On April 17, Israel’s Holocaust commemoration day, the façade of a different synagogue in Barcelona was vandalized. The perpetrators wrote then: “Free Palestine from the river to the sea. Solidarity with the Palestinian people.” Both graffiti were in Catalan.

The Jewish Federations of Spain, FCJE, and Barcelona’s Jewish community in a joint statement called out political leaders in Barcelona and Catalonia, the semi-autonomous region whose capital is Barcelona, for allegedly failing to condemn the incidents.

“Mayor Ada Colau, President of the Government of Catalonia Pere Aragonès and the vice president of the Parliament of Catalonia, Alba Vergès, have not condemned those attacks,” the statement read. “They have not visited the sites of the attacks to express any solidarity.”