Shocked residents of Paris woke up Tuesday morning to find some apartment buildings and businesses owned by Jews in the French capital vandalized with blue painted Stars of David, evoking horrific memories of the days before World War II when Nazis were rounding up the faithful and sending them off to their deaths.

French prosecutors told the AFP news agency they were opening an investigation following the appearance of dozens of examples of the graffiti in Paris’s 14th arrondissement in southern Paris. Similar tags appeared over the weekend in suburbs of the city, including Vanves, Fontenay-aux-Roses and Aubervilliers, some of which were accompanied with language stating “Palestine will overcome.”

A representative of the Union of Jewish Students of France said the graffiti was meant to mirror the way Jews were forced to wear the stars by the Nazi regime. “This act of marking recalls the processes of the 1930s and the Second World War which led to the extermination of millions of Jews,” the group’s president, Samuel Lejoyeux, told the agency. “The people who did this clearly wanted to terrify.”

Europe and America have both been rocked in recent days by growing signs of open antisemitism on college campuses and beyond since the war in Israel started October 7. Jewish day schools have canceled classes in some places, and security at synagogues has been stepped up.

The chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum at Washington, D.C. released a statement Tuesday saying that the group is gravely concerned about the uptick in antisemitism in recent weeks. “We are witnessing a horrific rise in antisemitism,” Stuart E. Eizenstat said. “College students, leaders, and the broader public need to learn the history and lessons of the Holocaust—the dangers of unchecked antisemitism, the power of propaganda, and the potential for complicity in group-targeted violence. All of us need to understand the lessons of the past and take responsibility for the future.”

In a further sign of the growing threat to all Parisians, police in the city shot and wounded a woman wearing an abaya who threatened to blow herself up after allegedly making death threats and speaking in support of terrorism on a train heading into the French capital.

Two police officers together fired eight shots, seriously injuring the woman, the Paris prosecutor’s office said. It said she was hospitalized for emergency treatment. She reportedly taunted passengers on a train into the capital with phrases like “You’re all going to get it,” “Allahu akbar,” and “Boom,” according to a police spokesman. 

A former prime minister of Israel, Naftali Bennett, warned in a social media post that those in the west who believe they are insulated from the terror inflicted on Israel are deluding themselves. 

“The distance between the massacre in Beeri Kibbutz and the streets of Paris is shorter than you think,” he wrote in a post on Twitter Tuesday noting the Parisian crosses. “Israel is fighting radical Islamic terror on its borders. If we don’t stop this terror here and now, you’ll get these massacres in Paris, London and New York City.”