A large fire, originally suspected to be a case of anti-Semitical vandalism, burnt the library of a large Geneva synagogue on the second day of Shavuot.
By Friday, however, police said they suspected an electrical failure as the fire's cause.
The fire was discovered shortly after 5 AM, at the Heichal HaNess synagogue in eastern Geneva, on the second day of the Shavuot holiday (which is celebrated for two days outside Israel). More than 40 firefighters were needed to extinguish the blaze, which police said appeared to have several sources. No one was hurt in the fire.
Heichal HaNess (lit. Miracle Sanctuary) was built in the early 1970's, and one of its founders was 84-year-old Nissim Gaon, chairman of the World Sephardi Federation. Heichal HaNess is one of Geneva's six synagogues. Very shortly after the fire was found, Gaon was quoted as saying it was due to an electrical fault.
The second-floor library was destroyed by the fire, as were some windows and the entrance hall, but the main prayer sanctuary was not damaged.
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Knesset Member Rabbi Chaim Amsalem (Shas) was the rabbi of the congregation for nearly two years, up until last year. He told Arutz-7 he plans to fly to Geneva on Sunday to be with his congregation during its difficult hour. "I can't speak to anyone from the congregation right now," Amsalem said, "because it is the Shavuot holiday there [when activities involving the active use of electricity and phone lines, and all forms of work defined by Jewish Law as "productive," are forbidden -ed.], and so I have not had any direct reports. However, I understand that the upstairs library, which I built, was destroyed. It was a room used for screening Torah classes from Israel, and had a very large collection of books."
If the fire was caused by anti-Semitic arson, it would be the second such torching of a Swiss synagogue in just over two years. In March 2005, in the southern Swiss city of Lugano, a synagogue and a Jewish-owned clothing store not far away were deliberately set ablaze. Within the next two months, the Grand Synagogue in Geneva was defaced with swastikas and neo-Nazi slogans, as was a Holocaust memorial in front of the synagogue, and 13 tombstones in the Jewish cemetery of La Tour-de-Peilz were found damaged or overturned. Graffiti was scrawled on a Geneva synagogue last year.
Some 18,000 Jews live in Switzerland, 5,000 of them in Geneva. Following the Lugano arson, Prof. Alfred Donath, the President of the Swiss Federation of Jewish Communities, told Arutz-7 of the tight bonds linking Swiss Jewry with Israel. "There are 11,000 Israelis with Swiss passports," he said, "and in the past year, almost 500 Jews made Aliyah [immigrated to Israel]. Most of them are young, and in fact, many of our communities have lost some of their best young people to Israel – and I don't mean that in a negative way; we have a good feeling about it."