A photographer and artist behind a red-triangle warning sign depicting the silhouette of an Orthodox Jewish man has apologised for causing offence after a Jewish neighbourhood watch group reported it as a hate crime.

Franck Allais, a freelance photographer, said the contentious sign was part of an artistic project, which includes depictions of a woman pulling a shopping trolley, a man pushing his wheelchair and a cat.

Allais said he intended the project to be a comment on identity and that the sign in Stamford Hill, one of the largest Hasidic communities in Europe, was not an antisemitic statement. He said he was left shaken by the offence he had caused.

He said: “It was a project about crossing the road … how everyone is different, everyone has an identity. There is not only one sign in the street. I put more signs up in the street, but only this one got noticed. I am sorry for any offence caused.”

Shomrim, a Jewish neighbourhood watch group that reported the sign to the Metropolitan police and Hackney council, said earlier it had caused “alarm and distress to local people”. Stamford Hill is at the centre of an ultra-Orthodox Jewish and mainly Hasidic community estimated to number about 30,000 people.

Barry Bard, Shomrim’s operational supervisor in the area, said: “The people of Stamford Hill are very sadly used to instances of antisemitic hate crime, but most of those times it will be verbal abuse or even assault. A lot of the time it will be more of a person-to-person kind of thing, or graffiti, which is more unprofessional.”

Allais, who has done work for Guardian Weekend, the Saturday and Sunday Telegraph, FT Weekend magazine, the Independent on Sunday, Newsweek and Time Out, said he had created the signs based on real people he saw crossing the road in the areas where the signs were later hung and photographed.

Some of the other signs have since been spotted.

Here's one of the other signs - put up in Egerton Road N16 pic.twitter.com/cnUcs12Xp9 — Jonathan Savage (@JSavageTweets) March 15, 2017

Hackney council was expected to remove the Stamford Hill sign on Wednesday.



The number of antisemitic incidents in the UK rose by more than a third to record levels in 2016, according to data released by the Community Security Trust.



The CST, which monitors antisemitism and provides security to Jewish communities, recorded 1,309 incidents of anti-Jewish hate last year, compared with 960 in 2015, a rise of 36%. The previous peak was in 2014, when 1,182 incidents were recorded.