Strange baby dolls made to look covered in blood were found strung up near a synagogue in Norrköping, Sweden, on the first night of the Passover holiday.
The incident appears to be antisemitic in nature, with a message accompanying the dolls being classified by the police as "a hate crime, one that intends to spread statements that threaten or oppress designated ethnic groups," police spokesperson Angelica Israelsson Silfver told the Swedish news outlet Expressen, the quote having been translated by the Sputnik news site.
The exact message is unclear, but according to the Anti-Defamation League, it had to do with the Passover holiday being a Jewish celebration of killing thousands of Egyptian children, in reference to the 10th plague, the killing of the firstborn.
However, the image also brings to mind the myth of the blood libels, where Jews were accused of killing Christian children to use their blood in the Passover matzah.
Antisemitism has been a problem in Sweden, which, according to Prime Minister Kjell Stefan Löfven, is partly due to memory of the Holocaust "falling into oblivion" and partly due to the massive influx of Middle Eastern immigrants, according to Sputnik.
The neo-Nazi Nordic Resistance Movement posted about it the next day and used a photo which appears to have been taken at night. We urge the police to take quick action against such intimidation and harassment. pic.twitter.com/mXxeehqY9z
— ADL (@ADL) March 30, 2021
While the police do not seem to have any leads, however, there appears to be evidence that the culprits are members of the far Right.
According to the ADL, which shared the information over Twitter, the neo-Nazi organization known as the Nordic Resistance Movement posted about the incident the following day, but used a photo that seems to have been taken at night.
The ADL called on police to "take quick action against such intimidation and harassments."