The man who attacked a French Catholic nun in Jerusalem has only added fuel to a sick fire

Recently, another hoodlum, presumably cut from the same cloth as Haredi extremists, attacked a French Catholic nun in Jerusalem, and its sadly revealed a serious and growing problem that not enough may have taken notice of:

Footage of an attack on a Catholic nun in Jerusalem shocked the world when it went viral last week, but for worshipers attending Sunday mass at Saint Stephen’s Basilica, it was just the latest example of mounting religious hostility.

The attack on Tuesday was captured by CCTV and shared widely, showing a Jewish extremist shoving the nun to the ground and leaving, before returning to resume his attack on her, at which point by-passers intervened.

As the congregation poured out of the Sunday service, the story was still on everyone’s lips, as many offered words and tokens of support for the French nun, who was not in attendance.

“She still has pains,” but she is “surrounded by support,” said the priest who led the service, Olivier Catel.

When Catel arrived in Jerusalem over a decade ago, such incidents were rare. Roughly once a year, he said, “when I went out in my habit, people — usually ultra-Orthodox Jews — would spit behind our back.”

“We never paid attention because they were isolated incidents,” he said. But for the past three or four years, it has become something of a daily occurrence.

“When we go out, people spit next to us.”

The Rossing Center, a Jerusalem-based association for interreligious dialogue, has documented “growing harassment” of Christians in Israel and East Jerusalem, according to a study released in March.

Throughout 2025, it recorded 61 physical attacks, including spitting, the use of pepper spray, and blows. It also recorded 28 cases of verbal harassment and 52 cases of defacement of church property.

A British priest who preferred to remain anonymous confirmed that such incidents occurred daily.

He never went out without his black robes and was invariably met with spitting or shouts of “Go home!” in his direction.

‘He should be killed’

“Everyone said this would happen someday,” said Pierre, a 30-year-old parishioner, who was “not surprised” by the incident and in fact expected things to escalate to a possible death if there were no intervention.

The day of the attack on the nun, a priest he knew was in the supermarket when a man stopped before him.

“He told his son, in Hebrew, ‘He should be killed,'” said Pierre. “If nothing is done… someone will take that step.”

That's definitely repulsive, and regardless of what anybody thinks of how Christianity's managed past and present, this cannot go unopposed. Most telling is how the same Haredi extremists who led to this never seem to say the same things about Islam, and one could validly wonder if it's because they actually do consider the Religion of Peace legitimate.

What makes incidents like this additionally repulsive is that it gives the MSM an excuse to do writeups that take attention away from more pressing issues like Islamofascism, and the worst part is that the hoodlums - Haredi or otherwise - who're harrassing Christians, are quite possibly doing it deliberately in order to harm Israel's image all the more. For all we know, that was probably why the IDF soldier who wrecked a Jesus statue in Lebanon pulled his atrocious act. Let's also note a lot of these same ultra-Orthodox also despise the Israeli flag, and that's telling too.

Columnist Nadav Shragai had the following to tell:

Sadly, this assault is not an isolated incident. It joins dozens of incidents over the past two years in which Christians in Jerusalem have been targeted on religious and racist grounds. They are allegedly carried out in the name of Judaism, but they have absolutely nothing to do with Judaism.

When incidents like this happen in Israel or abroad and Jews, usually visibly ultra-Orthodox, are the ones attacked, we rightly raise an outcry and define them as "antisemitic" and as "racially motivated terrorism." That is the case in Stamford Hill in London, in Williamsburg in Brooklyn, New York, and in Antwerp, Belgium.

In Israel, by contrast, similar incidents, even if they are on a far smaller scale and carried out only by a small handful of people, take place in the capital and elsewhere in the country and are met with horrifying media silence.

Almost no response

Among our rabbis, too, the overwhelming majority of them, and among our politicians, also the overwhelming majority, the attack on the nun in Jerusalem, which received wide coverage in many foreign media outlets and blackened our image in public, passed almost without response.

This was not only a vile act and an assault on a cleric and on a person created in the image of God. It was also a public desecration of God's name and of Judaism. Such an incident also plays into the hands of our enemies, direct and indirect, who challenge our sovereignty and our right to govern Jerusalem. It weakens our claim to freedom of religion in Jerusalem. It even weakens the just demand of Jews who seek to visit and pray on the Temple Mount without harassment and acts of violence.

For some reason, those attackers believe they are sanctifying God's name, or "settling accounts over Christianity's many sins against us throughout the generations." Is there no chief rabbi, city rabbi or neighborhood rabbi whose voice will be heard publicly, who will set them straight, denounce them, call for them to be cast out from our midst, and explain that historical reckonings of this kind are not the business of individuals, but belong in theological dialogue between religious leaders?

The story of the attack on the nun and other incidents like it must transcend political camps, Right and Left, religious and secular. It is foreign to us as Jews. We must make it not only illegitimate, but utterly repugnant. Such incidents have no connection whatsoever to even the fiercest struggle against terrorism, nor to collective punishment of an environment that supports terrorism. This is religious racism, pure and simple, which we Jews have suffered from and continue to suffer from across generations.

Of course it's repulsive, and if the response to this has been muted in comparison with the incident in Lebanon, which was possibly carried out by a Haredi soldier, that's very bad too. The mayor should reach out to the nun and the church she works at, and invite them to city hall to make some points clear about why this incident is entirely unacceptable to Judaism.

A commentor stated:

I agree with this writer. I'm sure that there are aspects of 'Ultra Orthodoxy' which may be laudable, but similarly, there are other aspects of their ideology which are lementable, - this certainly being one such example. They seem to live such 'a narrow existence', that they are oblivious to the damage that they are doing to the rest of Israeli and in fact Jewish society. To add 'insult to injury', as a section of the population that avoids serving, it is left to others to make amends for their egregious behaviour. To be sure, I am not a 'supporter' of the Catholic, and some other Christian sects, however, this is not the way to register one's opinion of the myriad of outrages perpetrated against the Jews in the past and in fact currently. This 'man', needs to be prosecuted and needs to be 'seen' to be prosecuted.

Clearly, there's others who realize the Haredis set this kind of behavior in motion, and their leaderships too are going to have to address this and above all, meet with the nun and her other church staff to apologize. But what if they don't? If not, that'll just make clear what continues to be wrong with the Haredi community.

Update: in similar news, a cafe in Ramat Gan that was open on Shabbat was torched by an arsonist, quite possibly, again, an ultra-Orthodox criminal:

An unknown individual set fire to a new cafe in Ramat Gan over the fact that the cafe is open on Saturdays, according to an N12 News report on Tuesday.

According to N12, the owner of the cafe received multiple threats regarding the cafe’s business hours since it opened.

The arson, which took place over the weekend, caused heavy damage to the building.

Tel Aviv District Police have initiated an investigation into the incident, launching a manhunt to find the suspected arsonist, who was captured on video setting the fire.

Ramat Gan mayor condemns fire, calls for community to support cafe

Ramat Gan Mayor Carmel Shama-Hacohen condemned the arson, stating that it was not only an attack on the cafe, but a direct attack on “the character of Ramat Gan as a city of liberty for everyone.”

"We will not allow any criminal to light a fire of hatred in the heart of Ramat Gan,” Shama-Hacohen asserted. "Anyone who thinks of setting up 'religious guards' in the city and burning down places that are open on Shabbat will quickly discover that they have achieved the opposite.”

He also encouraged the local community to support the cafe as a show of his city’s strength.

According to N12, Shama-Hacohen also called for the cafe to be supplied with double the number of tables and chairs it had before the fire to accommodate new customers who visit to support the business.

So here we have another monster on the loose who, it could be said, violated the 10 Commandments section that says, "Thou shalt not use God's name in vain", and definitely committed a serious offense that could've resulted in lives lost if there were people in the building at the time. One of the worst things about cases like these is that the Haredi extremists who did this undoubtably are hoping to tarnish Judaism and Israel's good name, and bolster leftists who want to stick it to the right. After all, the Haredi MO draws from socialist tactics like living on welfare, so it's not like there's that much difference between leftists and Haredi zealots when it comes to topics like those.