Vandals spray anti-Semitic graffiti in two Paris suburbs

JTA — Large swastikas were scrawled on a kosher pizzeria in suburban Paris.

The Jewish owner of the B’Paradise pizzeria in Sarcelles discovered the swastikas on Monday, according to Metro, a French daily. The newspaper reported that the swastikas were spray-painted Saturday on the shop display of the pizzeria, which overlooks the main synagogue of Sarcelles, a northern suburb of Paris that is home to  approximately 60,000 Jews.

In September, members of what French authorities described as “a dangerous Jihadist network” detonated a grenade inside a kosher supermarket in Sarcelles, lightly wounding one person.

Also Saturday, unknown individuals spray-painted slogans praising Mohammed Merah, the killer of four Jews in Toulouse on March 19, in Orgeval, an eastern suburb of the French capital. A report in L’Union, a local paper, said one piece of graffiti called for the release of Youssouf Fofana, the leader of a gang who in 2006 tortured and killed Ilan Halimi, a young Jewish man from the Paris region, because they wanted to kill a Jew.

Meanwhile, on Monday, a headmaster of a school in Melilla, a Spanish city on the Moroccan coastline, denied reports that the recent assault of a Jewish high school student by Muslim classmates was motivated by anti-Semitism or related to the Israeli-Arab conflict.

The boy was assaulted on Nov. 23 at the Enrique Nieto School, according to a report in Melilla Hoy, a local newspaper. The report did not say whether the boy sustained any injuries.