Polish police seize “No Jews Allowed” banner from hotel

Polish police seized a banner reading “No Jews, speculators and traitors allowed” from the entrance to a hotel that reportedly is owned by an ultra-nationalist who is jailed for antisemitic hate speech.

Officers were sent to Dom Polski near the western city of Wroclaw on Thursday night following the surfacing of images on social networks showing the banner on the gate to the Dom Polski hotel in the eastern suburb of Cesarzowice, Paweł Petrykowski, a spokesperson for the police department of the Lower Silesia Province, told TVP, Poland’s national public broadcaster.

The hotel, which featured the banner since spring, is owned by Piotr Rybak, an ultra-nationalist who earlier this year was sentenced to three months in prison for burning an effigy of a Jew at a 2015 demonstration in Wroclaw against Muslim immigration, Cesarzowic Mayor Jolanta Szulc told TVP.

The regional prosecutor’s office is looking into charging Rybak with another indictment for racist hate speech in connection with the banner, Małgorzata Kalus, the prosecutor department’s spokeswoman, told TVP.
Rybak had been under house arrest until last week when a District Court judge in Wrocław sent him to jail for violating the terms of his detention. Rybak violated those terms by participating in a nationalist march in Wroclaw on November 11 that featured antisemitic rhetoric.
The same day, 60,000 people attended a larger march in Warsaw, where some participants waived anti-Muslim banners and shouted antisemitic slogans.

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