Mezuzah smashed, swastika carved at Jewish student’s home in the Netherlands

A swastika is carved into the doorframe of a Jewish student’s house in the Dutch city of Maastricht and the mezuzah is torn off.

The Maastricht University student discovers the damage to his mezuzah, an object containing scripture on parchment that Jews affix to their doorframes, and makes a police complaint, the Netherlands chapter of the StandWithUs pro-Israel group writes in a statement.

The student, whom StandWithUs did not name, suspects one of his neighbors perpetrated the vandalism, according to the statement, but no one has been apprehended. The student and Elad Zigler, the director of StandWithUs Netherlands, say they consider the incident an anti-Semitic attack.

Dutch Jewry’s watchdog for anti-Semitism last year recorded the highest number of anti-Semitic incidents ever observed in a calendar year.

The group, the Center for Information and Documentation on Israel, or CIDI, has been monitoring anti-Semitism in the Netherlands for about 30 years. It listed 182 incidents in 2019, an increase of 35% from 2018.