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Thursday, June 12, 2014

By the way, synagogues are being burned down...in Israel

This was barely reported last week:
Three synagogues in Israel sustained significant fire damage over the weekend, in what police suspect were arson cases. No injuries were reported and it is unclear at this time whether the cases are related.

The first fire took place at a synagogue located at the Morasha School in Petach Tikva, where the structure was burned to the ground. The second incident took place near Wadi Ara, where a Chabad synagogue housed in a caravan caught fire and was severely damaged.

According to available details, both fires appear to have taken place in the early hours of Saturday morning.

The third incident saw the Great Synagogue on Hovevei Zion Street in Petach Tikva set ablaze. Firefighters were called to the scene around noon Saturday, and were able to extinguish the flames. Several Torah books were completely burned and the synagogue's Torah ark was damaged.

"Initial findings suggest that an unknown individual entered the synagogue in the middle of the day, when it was empty, opened several books, poured a flammable liquid on the ark, set it on fire and fled the scene," a statement by the Petach Tikva Police said.
There have reportedly been ten such synagogue attacks in Israel recently.

In this video, Moshe Feiglin in the Knesset asks the Minister of Public Security Yitzchak Ahranovich about these 10 synagogues that were burned recently in Israel. He asks him what percentage of the time invested by the police/Shabak in interrogating kids who spray painted slogans somewhere will be used to look for those people who are responsible for burning the synagogues. And if, he asks, they discover that whoever did it was from an Arab village, will he demand that that village be destroyed, as he said recently about a Jewish town in the Shomron from which he claimed that spray-painters came from, even though there was no proof?

And look at apparent disinterest on Ahranovich's face. (Sorry, no subtitles)



Not to justify "price tag" graffiti in any way, but it is unbelievable that synagogue arson gets less attention in Israel than it does when it happens in Europe or North America. There is a real problem, and it is not kids spray-painting offensive slogans.

(h/t Yerushalimey, video description mostly quoted from a FB page but I don't have the link)