News Brief

(IsraelNN.com) More than 200 New York area residents gathered outside the Israeli Consulate in midtown Manhattan Sunday morning to mourn the murder of eight yeshiva students at Jerusalem's Merkaz HaRav Yeshiva Thursday night.

The Manhattan mourners marched to the Sharansky steps of the Isaiah Peace Wall opposite the United Nations to "decry a world body largely silent in face of brutal Palestinian terrorism," according to a press release from AMCHA - the Coalition for Jewish Concerns.  

Speaking to a crowd bearing Israeli flags, books of Psalms, and signs, Amcha-CJC national president Rabbi Avi Weiss declared: "The war being waged against our people defies two conventions throughout history.  The first is that people want to live.  The second is that in war, one combatant faces off against another.  But our brutal enemy is more interested in death than life.  And our enemies are cowards, not fighting man to man, but walking into a yeshiva, murdering teenagers as they are leaning over a Talmud, literally staining the word of G-d with blood.  The death of a person in war is a death of a person, but when you murder a student studying Torah, it's the murder of a world, the soul, spirit and conscience of a world." 
 
Led by Rabbis Steven Burton of  Congregation Shaarei Shalom, Shaul Robinson of Lincoln Square Synagogue,  Allen Schwartz of Congregation Ohab Zedek, Jason Herman of the West Side Jewish Center and Etan Mintz of Amcha-CJC, the names of the murdered students were read.