Photo by RNS/Reuters

A man reads a prayer at a desecrated grave in Israel.

This Time It's Swastikas

LARRY DERFNER
Israel Correspondent

e

ver the High Holidays,
somebody scrawled Nazi
swastikas and the epithets,
"Cursed evildoers," and
"Evildoers, you will die," on the front
door of the Reform movement's Har-
El Congregation synagogue in mid-
town Jerusalem.
This was only the latest act of
vandalism against Har-El, Israel's
oldest Reform synagogue, in recent
months. Over the summer, someone
smeared human excrement on the
synagogue door. On two other occa-
sions, somebody poured acid on the
synagogue garden, turning the grass
yellow.
All these incidents took place
a
when the building was closed. The
police haven't arrested anybody, and
local Reform Jews don't think the

Conservative and Reform
synagogues in Israel defaced just
before Yom Kippur.

police — or Israel as a whole, for that
matter — are terribly interested in
the problem. _
"After the swastikas and the graffi-
ti, the policeman who came to inves-
tigate asked us, 'Are you connected
with the Jews for Jesus?' From his
tone you could infer that he thought
we should expect that things like this
would happen to us," said Rabbi
David Ariel-Joel, leader of the Har-el
congregation.
"In Europe, when swastikas are
written on a synagogue, the police
usually catch the criminal and put

him in jail. Israel is the only country
in the world where anti-Semitic acts
can be carried out — swastikas can
be printed on a synagogue, [non- -
Orthodox] rabbis can be vilified — -
and it doesn't seem to move anyone,"
he added.
There was no outcry, to say the
least, after any of the acts of vandal-
ism. After the latest incident, the
only public figure who spoke out
was Jewish Agency Chairman
Avraham Burg. He said anyone who
commits such a sin should forget
about being forgiven on Yom Kippur.

The members of Har-El, however,
were not alone in being targets. On
the morning of Yom Kippur, mem-
bers of the Conservative Hod
V'Hadar synagogue in Kfar Saba dis-
covered that the glass front door had
been smashed and the mezuzah
yanked from the doorway. On Rosh
Hashanah night, a side window of
the synagogue had been broken, and
last month the mailbox had been
pulled off the wall.
Emily Levy-Shochat, president of
the congregation, said she had writ-
ten off the two earlier incidents as
simple hooliganism, but the Yom
Kippur vandalization made it clear to
her these were religiously-motivated
crimes.
If recent history is a teacher, the
vandals who attacked Har-el and
Hod V'Hadar will not be caught. No
one has been apprehended in the
recent torching of a Reform nursery

10/17

1997

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