(Photo by INA FASSBENDER/AFP via Getty Images)
- Ronnie Phillips was leaving a theatre in London with his wife on 12 August.
- As he left, he was slapped and had his kippah thrown to the ground.
- The Metropolitan Police are investigating this as an antisemitic incident.
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Police in London are investigating the antisemitic assault of an elderly man that occurred outside a theatre on 12 August.
Ronnie Phillips, 72, and his wife were attending a showing of Leopoldstadt, a play about the Holocaust. Upon leaving the Charing Cross theatre, he was physically assaulted.
Phillips was "slapped round the head" and had his kippah – also called a yarmulke, a Jewish skull cap – thrown to the ground, according to his wife Emma, who reported the incident to the police, reported the Jewish News.
The Metropolitan Police told Jewish News that officers attended "Charing Cross Road, WC2 shortly before 22:10hrs on Thursday 12 August to reports of a religiously-aggravated assault."
A spokesperson for the Community Security Trust, a UK charity working to combat antisemitism that this incident was a "completely inexcusable antisemitic assault on a visibly Jewish man, and all the more distressing because it happened right outside a play about the Holocaust," reported the Jewish News.
The UK has recently seen a record-high number of antisemitic assaults, with the CST report for the first half of 2021 showing 1,308 antisemitic incidents - almost a 50% increase from the same portion of 2020.
The CST believes that this hate is linked to the increased conflict between Israel and Palestine.