PARIS, France — A Palestinian man was taken into custody after he threw a chair at a rabbi on a cafe terrace in a wealthy Paris suburb, a police source told AFP, in an attack France’s main Jewish association condemned as antisemitic.

According to the source, the suspect attacked Rabbi Elie Lemmel in the western Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine. Lemmel was taken to hospital with a head injury.

The assailant was arrested and is in detention.

The attacker is a Palestinian man residing illegally in Germany, said a source close to the case, adding that the man benefits from a status that offers a form of protection for people who cannot be deported to a conflict zone.

An investigation has been launched into aggravated assault, prosecutors said.

The rabbi was talking to a person he had arranged to meet when he was attacked, receiving “a huge blow to the head.”

“I fell to the ground and heard people shouting ‘stop him’, and I realized that I had just been attacked,” he told broadcaster BFMTV.

The rabbi said he had been attacked twice in the space of a week. Last Friday he was attacked in the northwestern town of Deauville when three drunk individuals hit him in the stomach.

“I am very afraid that we are living in a world where words are generating more and more evil,” he said.

The French Jewish community, one of the largest in the world, has seen a number of attacks on Jews and and desecrations of memorials since the Hamas assault on southern Israel on October 7, 2023, that sparked the Gaza war.  Some 1,200 people were killed and another 251 taken hostage.

The Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF) condemned “in the strongest possible terms the antisemitic attack on the rabbi.”

“In a general context where hatred of Israel fuels the stigmatization of Jews on a daily basis, this attack is yet another illustration of the toxic climate targeting French Jews,” the CRIF said on X.

Yonathan Arfi, the CRIF president, said: “Nothing, not even solidarity with the Palestinians, can ever justify attacking a rabbi.”

France’s Holocaust memorial, three Paris synagogues and a restaurant were vandalized with paint last week.

A judge has charged three Serbs with vandalizing the Jewish sites “to serve the interests of a foreign power”, a judicial source said on Friday.

In 2024, a total of 1,570 antisemitic acts were recorded in France, according to the interior ministry.