Police have arrested a man on suspicion of religiously aggravated assault of the father of a batmitzvah girl outside the premises of their North London synagogue.

In a Facebook post, Daniel Zylbersztajn-Lewandowski claimed he had been “abused and assaulted… by one individual just before my daughter's batmitzvah and beaten to the ground”.

The alleged incident took place on Saturday morning outside the community hall of a church in Stoke Newington which is used for services by Kehillah North London, a Progressive Jewish community.

The Metropolitan Police said officers had arrived on the scene after a call at around 10.25 on Saturday. “A man, aged in his 20s, was arrested on suspicion of religiously aggravated assault. He was taken into custody and bailed to a date in early February 2023," the Met said.

Mr Zylbersztajn-Lewandowski, a London correspondent for a German newspaper, is a former communication and education officer of Oasis for Peace UK, the charity which supports Wahat al Salam-Neve Shalom, the Jewish-Arab village in Israel.

He told the JC that he had arrived ahead of the service in his car to drop off food for the batmitzvah celebration but found a van parked outside.

The altercation began after he had asked a man loading the van how long he would be.

In his Facebook post, he praised police for having arrived swiftly and being supportive and thanked members of the congregation for “supporting me as I sat crying (out of upset) and bleeding (only from my lip).”

He did not want the incident, he wrote, “to spoil our great family day.  We had to carry on… 

“Nobody was expecting great joy and hate all mingled up together in one day, almost in the way we read about it in Sholem Aleichem's Tevye the Milkman (Fiddler on the Roof), but I knew there was no choice but to carry on…

“The festival that continued was the best cure to the nastiness and the tears of the morning. In the evening, we danced united as brothers and sisters, Jews and non-Jews, believers and non-believers.”

He wrote on Sunday that he had “some swelling around the jaw and a light headache”.

Mr Zylbersztajn-Lewandowski has raised issues about security for services previously and believes a van should not have been allowed to park outside.