2 Jewish Extremists Arrested for Vandalizing Jerusalem Monastery
Image by getty images
Israel has arrested two Jewish youths for anti-Christian graffiti scrawled on a Jerusalem monastery, police said on Wednesday, after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered an investigation into the latest in a wave of hate crimes.
The 16- and 15-year-old males were suspected of involvement in Hebrew curses like “Christians go to hell” that were written in felt-tip pen on the doors and walls of the Dormition Abbey in Jerusalem’s Old City over the weekend, police said.
The Benedictine monastery bills itself as a bastion of inter-faith understanding. It is near a site where many Christians believe Jesus held the Last Supper as well as the tomb of the biblical King David, a big draw for pious Jews.
Israeli authorities have been struggling to stamp out hate crimes by Jewish ultra-nationalists targeting Christian sites as well as Palestinians and Israeli human rights activists.
Calling the Dormition Abbey vandalism an attack on religious co-existence, Netanyahu and his police minister had called for an accelerated probe to catch the culprits.
Jerusalem’s Old City, which Israel captured in the 1967 war and annexed as part of its capital in a move not recognized internationally, has been on heightened security alert during a months-long wave of Palestinian street violence, with wall-to-wall security camera coverage and paramilitary police patrols.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
