Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has condemned an attack on a Holocaust memorial in the French city of Strasbourg.

Netanyahu on Sunday condemned the "horrific, anti-Semitic" defacing of a monument marking the site of a synagogue destroyed by the Nazis in 1940.

French police on Saturday launched an investigation the incident, in which a heavy memorial stone was moved off its base in the eastern city. The incident comes amid a rise in anti-Semitic attacks in France in recent months, including spray-painting of swastikas on around 80 Jewish gravestones last month.

Netanyahu called upon "all leaders of enlightened countries to join in denouncing it in a systematic and continuous fashion. The first way to combat anti-Semitism is to denounce, to condemn it unequivocally."