Two 19-year-old men have been convicted and sentenced to prison in France after filming themselves performing Nazi salutes outside a shul in Sarcelles, home to one of the country’s largest Jewish communities.

The incident occurred around 11 p.m. Sunday and was captured on surveillance cameras and a cellphone near a memorial honoring victims of terrorist Mohammed Merah’s 2012 attacks in Toulouse.

A court in Pontoise, in the Val-d’Oise department north of Paris, convicted the two in an expedited proceeding.

One of the men, a Russian citizen, was sentenced to eight months in prison and permanently banned from France. His accomplice, a Ukrainian-born French citizen, was sentenced to six months behind bars.

The pair were arrested three days after the incident in Sarcelles along with a third suspect whose identity has not been disclosed. Local police tracked them down after residents spotted their actions near the memorial.

Moïse Kahloun, president of the Jewish community in Sarcelles, welcomed the sentences, calling tough punishment “the only way to deal with the wave of antisemitism across France.”

France’s Jewish community has reported a sharp increase in antisemitic incidents in recent years, particularly since the Hamas terrorist attacks against Israel on October 7, 2023, and the war that followed.

(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)