Vol. 81/No. 10 March 13, 2017
Solidarity marks response to attacks on
temples, mosques
On Feb. 27 dozens of volunteers showed up that morning in work gear ready to repair the damage. Among them were about two dozen young people from the local Ahmadiyya Muslim Community. Two members of the Bricklayers and Allied Craftworkers Union, whose members include stonemasons, joined in.
“This was the most cowardly act you could imagine,” said union President Dennis Pagliotti.
A week earlier vandals overturned and damaged about 200 headstones at a Jewish cemetery in St. Louis.
“It’s hard to express how terrible it was. It was horrible,” Anita Feigenbaum, executive director of the Chesed Shel Emeth Cemetery, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Feigenbaum reported that there was a “tremendous outpouring of support” from people who wanted to donate money and others volunteering to help clean up.
On Feb. 20 bomb threats were called into Jewish community centers in 11 cities. A similar round of threats was received in January. All told, there have been 90 anti-Semitic attacks or bomb threats at 73 Jewish community centers in 30 states and one Canadian province since the beginning of the year, reported the Wall Street Journal.
“This is a horrific and disgusting act of vandalism which cannot be tolerated,” Imam Mufti Asif Umar of the Islamic Foundation of Greater St. Louis, said in a statement released to the media. “We stand with our Jewish friends.”
The Council on American-Islamic Relations, a prominent Muslim civil-rights organization, has offered a $5,000 reward for information leading to conviction of those responsible for issuing the bomb threats. As of Feb. 28 a Muslim-organized LaunchGood campaign with over 4,600 backers had raised $138,000 to help repair the damaged Jewish cemeteries in St. Louis and Philadelphia.
In suburban Tampa, Florida, mosque officials were called out after 2 a.m. Feb. 24 when authorities told them the Islamic Society’s Daarus Salaam Mosque had been hit with an arson attack.
“Whoever did this maybe intended to discourage us,” said mosque spokesperson Mazen Bondogji at a press conference later that morning. “But this makes us stronger than before, than ever, because of the huge amount of support and solidarity we are receiving.”
“This is no different than the wave of anti-Semitic attacks on Jewish community centers,” said Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn at a press conference condemning the attack on the mosque.
Jewish residents in a Toronto apartment building discovered that their doors were vandalized with Nazi symbols and that their Mezuzahs (small ritual scrolls affixed to doorposts) were damaged or removed Feb. 20. “Like all acts of hatred and intolerance, these deliberate acts of hostility toward the Jewish community are completely unacceptable,” said Adam Minsky, president and CEO of the United Jewish Appeal Federation of Greater Toronto.
On Feb. 8, an outfit called the Canadian National Independence party distributed flyers at the University of Western Ontario in the city of London accusing “Jewish terrorists” of shooting and killing six Muslim worshippers at a Quebec City mosque at the end of January and calling for “all Zionists in Canada to be tried as terrorists and all members put in jail.”
In response to the anti-Semitic leaflet the university student council issued a strong statement of solidarity with the Jewish students.
Early in the morning on Feb. 21 arsonists set fire to the Islamic Cultural Association of Kungalv and the mosque in Goteborg, Sweden, causing major damage. A month before, in response to a series of arson attacks against mosques, more than 1,000 demonstrators marched by the parliament building in Stockholm in solidarity with Muslims.
George Chalmers in Philadelphia contributed to this article.
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