Graffiti on Belgická Street reignites debate over antisemitism in Czechia — and how authorities and communities respond

PRAGUE

The words “Holocaust 2025,” scrawled in blue spray paint across the window of a Jewish souvenir and kosher shop in Prague’s Vinohrady district, have become the latest flashpoint in a month of repeated vandalism that is rattling the city’s Jewish community and testing the country’s approach to hate crimes. It is the third such defacement of the same storefront in roughly four weeks, according to local reports and police statements.

Security camera footage reviewed by the shop’s staff shows a lone man arriving in the predawn hours—typically between 4:00 and 5:00 a.m.—pausing to stare into the lens before tagging the glass and facade. In one recording he wore a wide-brimmed sombrero; in another incident earlier this summer he urinated at the entrance before moving on, the owners said. The latest vandalism was discovered in the first week of September, shortly after overnight footage captured the suspect spraying the slogans “Fascists” and “Holocaust 2025” in large letters.

Prague police say the case is under investigation as property damage, a charge that can carry a prison term of up to three years. The department’s extremism and terrorism unit has been consulted on the case, authorities added, after the series of incidents drew widespread attention online. As of publication, no arrest had been announced.

For the city’s Jewish leaders, the crime is about more than paint. “This is a completely unacceptable act that crosses all boundaries,” said Pavel Král, chairman of the Prague Jewish community, who urged witnesses to report any antisemitic incidents to the police and to the Federation of Jewish Communities of the Czech Republic, which tracks hate crimes nationwide. “Such incidents have been on the rise since the outbreak of the war in Gaza,” he added.

Inside the shop on Belgická Street, employees spent hours scrubbing the blue stains from glass and stone while keeping the doors open. “We won’t be intimidated,” said owner David Fábry, who told Czech media that similar harassment has escalated over several years—from spitting at windows, to crude scrawls, to direct threats. Messages of support, he said, have been pouring in from across Prague and abroad, with neighbors offering to help cover cleanup costs.

The police named no suspect and declined to discuss investigative details. But the pattern is clear: three incidents in about a month, all clustered in the early morning, and all focused on the same small business. The use of “Holocaust 2025”—a phrase that fuses a genocidal past with an ominous date—was particularly chilling to many readers who saw images circulating on Czech-language news sites and social media. Rabbi David Maxa, posting on X, warned that society must not look away from such messages: first the slogans, then smashed windows, and, in the darkest chapters of European history, deportations and murder.

Context matters here. The Czech Republic remains, by most accounts, one of the safer countries in Europe for Jews. Yet antisemitic incidents rose sharply in 2023, according to Jewish communal monitors, with a notable spike in online harassment and public hate speech following the outbreak of the Israel–Hamas war in October of that year. Community organizations have responded by expanding documentation and educational programs, including a multi-year initiative known as MANTIC to improve reporting and analysis of antisemitism.

Legally, prosecutors have several tools at their disposal: beyond property-damage provisions, Czech law allows charges related to incitement to hatred and support of movements seeking to suppress rights and freedoms. In practice, however, investigators tend to build cases on the offenses that are easiest to prove—such as damage to property—unless they can establish clear extremist motives. That is why the involvement of the police’s extremism unit matters, even at an early stage.

To some observers, the spray-painted phrase seemed calculated to provoke and to plant an idea of “the next time.” The use of a future year alongside the word “Holocaust” echoed extremist memes that circulate online, where performative shock is the point. That does not make the act less serious offline, say analysts; rather, it underscores how digital radicalization can spill into physical spaces—especially those, like Jewish businesses and institutions, that already carry heavy symbolic weight.

Neighbors, too, have responded. Residents on the quiet residential blocks of Vinohrady—tree-lined and dotted with cafes—said the sight of blue paint on a small shop window felt like a jarring anachronism. “It reminded me of photos from the 1930s my grandparents kept,” one woman said, declining to be named. “I’m not Jewish, but this is not the Prague I want.” Others said they hoped the increased attention would hasten an arrest but worried that an online pile-on could drive the perpetrator deeper into the attention economy he seems to seek.

As the shopkeepers and volunteers removed most of the graffiti, the broader questions multiplied. Will prosecutors treat the case as a hate crime? Should penalties be increased when the target is a place of worship or communal commerce? Do local governments need specialized funds for rapid cleanups of bias-motivated vandalism, to prevent copycat attacks that feed on public visibility? And, crucially, how can civic and religious leaders counter the normalization of dehumanizing language that often precedes violence?

There are no simple answers, but there are precedents. The Jewish Museum in Prague and allied institutions have, for years, run programs in schools that explore the roots of antisemitism alongside the rituals and history of Jewish life—placing the conversation in a broader cultural context. Educational outreach is not a substitute for enforcement, community leaders emphasize, but it is one of the few tools that can blunt the appeal of conspiracy theories before they become a worldview.

The shop on Belgická Street reopened the day the graffiti was discovered. Customers stepped around buckets and rags to buy kosher staples and small Judaica items— amid local media crews filming the cleanup. The owners hope that routine will be part of the answer: normal life, defiantly lived. Yet they also want a clear line from authorities that targeting Jewish places will be treated with the seriousness it deserves. In recent statements, police have reiterated the potential prison term for property damage and noted the engagement of the extremism and terrorism unit.

For many in Prague, the fear is not that this one case portends a wave of physical assaults—there were no reports of injuries—but that tolerance of repeated intimidation signals a societal shrug. That, Jewish leaders warn, is how an ambient climate of threat takes hold. “Antisemitism is not only an attack on Jews,” one rabbinic statement circulating online read. “It is a poison that corrodes the whole of society. It is in all our hands how we deal with it.”

A month of three defacements, a suspect’s face plainly visible on video, and a phrase that weaponizes memory: together they have forced a reckoning. Prague’s history is layered—synagogues and stumbling stones, museums and memorials—but it is also lived in daily encounters at local shops. If there is a lesson from this bruising August, it may simply be vigilance: quick reporting by neighbors, swift cleanup to deny vandals the stage they seek, and consistent enforcement that draws a bright line against hate. The rest—the hard work of building a civic culture where such messages fail to land—will take longer. But it begins on streets like Belgická, before dawn, with a camera lens, a spray can, and a choice.

Sources: Prague Morning (Sept. 4, 2025); Novinky.cz (Sept. 4, 2025); Aktuálně.cz (Sept. 4–5, 2025); Federation of Jewish Communities in the Czech Republic; IHRA/UN educational resources.