October 26, 2012
Israeli tourist suffers ‘anti-Semitic abuse’ in Polish taxi
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An Israeli tourist visiting Poland reportedly filed a complaint with police against a taxi driver for making anti-Semitic remarks.
The tourist, Clila Bau, visited Poland last week with her sister, Hadas, according to the online edition of the Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza.
The two came to Krakow to attend an exhibition of the works of their father, Joseph Bau, a Jewish artist who survived the Holocaust in Poland thanks to Oskar Schindler.
After the Oct. 16 event at Krakow’s Schindler Museum was concluded, Cila Bau boarded a taxi cab belonging to the company Mega Taxi.
When the driver learned she was from Israel “the journey turned into hell,” Clila Bau is quoted as saying.
She said the driver “yelled” that in Israel, Jews stole land from Arabs, and the Jews should be thankful to Poles for “taking them in when everybody else threw them out.”
When they reached the destination, the driver threw her suitcase out of the car and told her to “get out and never come back,” according to her account in Gazeta Wyborcza.
The online edition of Gazeta Krakow quoted the driver as denying that he hurled anti-Semitic insults at Bau. “We had a discussion on ideology,” the paper quoted him as saying.
Boaz Pash, the chief Orthodox rabbi of Krakow, said that anti-Semitic incidents in Krakow are “unusual and less common than in other European countries.”
Pash said that in six years of living in Poland, he has received very few negative reactions. “This incident sounds very unpleasant, but you can find hooligans anywhere,” he said.
