A 19-year-old Haifa man has been arrested in connection with an anti-Semitic attack on a local synagogue.
Haifa police arrested the suspect on Sunday afternoon for allegedly torching the synagogue’s sukkah (holiday booth) and burning it to the ground. The suspect, whose remand has been extended for seven days, is also being held on suspicion of scrawling swastikas on holy books and at least one of the synagogue’s Torah scrolls. The items were recovered not far from the site.
The Haifa police commander made a point of telling journalists that unlike members of the highly-publicized gang arrested last month, the suspect is not a new immigrant neo-Nazi, referring to him instead as a “young Israeli.” The suspect was allegedly involved in other anti-Semitic incidents as well.
The Haifa police commander emphasized the 19-year-old suspect is a 'young Israeli'.
The city has recently been the venue for other incidents of Nazi vandalism. Residents of an Allenby Street apartment building in Haifa last week reported finding anti-Semitic graffiti on the walls of their stairwell. The scrawls included anti-Semitic slogans and at least one swastika.
Two neo-Nazis attacked a 70-year-old woman who was walking on the bridge connecting the Meridian Hotel and the Neveh David neighborhood in Haifa on September 17. The victim said "two gang members" beat her, one kicking her and causing her injuries, and the other snapping to a Nazi salute and shouting out "Heil Hitler." She was able to escape when a streetsweeper stepped in to help her. The Nazi youth beat him, too.
Haifa Radio reported that on the same day, not far from the scene of that attack, neo-Nazis victimized a family from Neveh Yosef. The family woke up to find their car's tires had been slit and that a huge swastika on top of a Star of David had been painted on the vehicle.
Meanwhile, neo-Nazi vandalism continues to spread to other communities across the country. On Monday, it was Holon’s turn. Residents of the city discovered three swastikas spray-painted on an electricity fuse box at a local school. Ayalon District police have opened an investigation into the incident.
A day earlier, residents of Ramat Hasharon discovered two swastikas spray-painted on the wall of a garbage chute on Bereishit Street. The Sunday morning defacement has been added to the list of anti-Semitic incidents being tracked in the center of the country.
Since the beginning of the holiday-packed Hebrew month of Tishrei, which fell on the evening of September 12th, Nazi graffiti and vandalism has spiked further, with attacks on synagogues reported in Bnei Brak, Dimona and Eilat.
There has been a string of anti-Semitic, Nazi-style attacks in cities across the country since the arrest of the neo-Nazi gang in Petach Tikva a little over a month ago. All the members of the gang were teens who were either themselves born in the former Soviet Union (FSU) or born to parents who emigrated from there to Israel.