aris, 28 September 2012
An
explosion occurred last night, after midnight, at the Malmö Jewish
Community Center. The exact circumstances are currently under investigation.
The Simon
Wiesenthal Centrer expresses its solidarity with the 700-member Jewish
community and its Rabbi, who has been incessantly targetted.
Rabbi
Kesselman and his children have been physically and verbally assaulted
some fifteen times in the last year. This Yom Kippur, his newly
purchased car was vandalized with engravings including "Palestina".
Subsequent
to a firebombing of the synagogue, assaults on a pro-Israel
demonstration and a series of other anti-Semitic incidents, the Wiesenthal
Center met in December 2011 in Malmö with the Mayor, law enforcement
officials, the Jewish community and Muslim and Roma leaders.
The Centre's Associate Dean, Rabbi Abraham Cooper and its Director for International Relations, Dr. Shimon Samuels, also met with Swedish Justice
Minister, Beatrice Ask in Stockholm, (pictured) seeking a commitment to
providing physical security for Jewish institutions. The Centre also
advised the Minister that - due to the continued provocations of Malmö
Mayor, Ilmar Reepalu, in constantly introducing the Middle East conflict
into local discourse and thereby
exacerbating tensions among the 70,000 Muslim community - it was
imposing a travel advisory on Malmö. Samuels, in March 2011, accompanied
President Obama's Special Envoy on Anti-Semitism, Hannah Rosenthal, to
meetings with Muslim and other minority leaders in the city. At a Malmö
University conference on hate crime, he also explained, "The Center's
concern that Malmö had become a microcosm of contemporary threat to
Jews, and serves as a case model for anti-Semitic hatemongering beyond
Sweden."
The Center
felt vindicated in that physical security of the synagogue is now partly
provided by the central government in Stockholm. "Yet the Mayor's
continued indifference, the ban on cameras due to privacy
considerations and the lack of a police presence has not prevented this new
attack. The Wiesenthal Centre was now again appealing to Stockholm to
provide permanent police surveillance as in other endangered communities
across Europe."
The explosion was apparently heard
several blocks away and cracked the bullet-proof main door of the Jewish
Community Center. "Such damage required sufficient expertise to
fabricate a device that, though primitive, sets a precedent for more
sophisticated explosives.
"We are
grateful that, this time, there were no casualties and understand that
two suspects have been detained. We are monitoring the situation and,
especially, the reaction of the Mayor. Whether it was Ahmadinejad's Yom
Kippur hate-speech at the United Nations or local sentiment fed by
Islamist or other racist websites, we await rigourous condemnation and
expressions of sympathy from Muslim leaders and a prompt prosecution of
the perpetrators. In the meantime, the Center's travel advisory remains
in place," concluded Samuels.
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