(I have been informed that much worse happened to another Jewish temple in St. Johns N.B.)
The Daily Gleaner
A swastika was scrawled on the doors of Fredericton’s Sgoolai Israel Synagogue during the overnight hours Sunday, the first such incident of vandalism in the synagogue’s 77-year history.
Rabbi Yosef Goldman said rather than protest the anti-Semitic act, he’s going to pray.
“My work here in Fredericton is always to teach people what Jewish people are all about and to remove any questions or ignorance,” Goldman said. “We don’t want it to turn into an endemic, but we also don’t want to overreact.”
An anti-Semitic slogan was written on a synagogue in St. John’s, N.L., last week. Goldman said he’s unsure if the two incidents are related.
He discovered the swastika on the synagogue’s front door when he arrived Monday morning. The swastika was traced in black marker and was surrounded by a black circle, about 20 centimetres in diameter.
Goldman notified the Anti-Defamation League and called the Fredericton Police Force, which is investigating the incident.
“Right now it’s a mischief to property damage, but obviously because of the symbol and where it was placed, it could also have a hidden message,” Sgt. Paul Battiste said Sunday.
Police are investigating the incident as a potential hate crime, he said, though that will only be determined through the course of the investigation.
“I’m certainly not coming out and saying it’s a hate crime, because you can’t say that until you figure out who the people were involved and what their intent was,” Battiste said.
“This is not something that’s typical in this city,” he said.
Though swastikas have been scrawled elsewhere in the city, it’s the first time one has been drawn on the synagogue.
He encouraged anyone with information about the vandalism to contact Fredericton police or Crime Stoppers.
Jon Goldberg, executive director of the Atlantic Jewish Council, said the two recent incidents are rare though not exclusive to synagogues.
“People write graffiti on churches, too,” he said.
Vandalism often goes unreported, though, with some people preferring to not give publicity to vandals, Goldberg said.
Goldman called drawing the swastika a cowardly act, but said he doesn’t think it’s part of a wider problem.
“We don’t know of any group that has an agenda against the Jews, definitely not in Fredericton,” he said.
“Fredericton is blessed with a lot of spirituality,” Goldman said. “We would like people to be aware that every person has a right to practise his or her religion in this country.”
Goldman said he intentionally neglected to take a photo of the swastika, and once police left the synagogue, he washed it away with acetone.
Welcome to the future the left wants for us.
Richard I was told about this event more than 24 hours before it was published anywhere. I can tell you that this event took place at 2 temples, one in N.B. and the other in Newfoundland. Also that the one in Nfld. was much worse than this article made it out to be. For reasons that eternally escape me, the Jewish community insists on the strategy of, ‘if we pretend it isn’t happening they will just go away’ which has not worked in Montreal and Quebec in general and also allows Canadians to feel that the problem is not what it is elsewhere here at home. I can’t even convince the people I know to send me the photos of the slogans and so on. This isn’t going to get better I suspect. But ignoring it is of questionable value.
This is disjointed, I am writing this off the top of my head and because of several things I have to do not going to clean it up. Bear with me, it does make sense even if it is disjointed.
The ostrich strategy (as I like to call it) is normally taken by the people who want peace at any cost, most people don’t want to fight or hurt people (I sure don’t) and the leftist propaganda/indoctrination of let the government take care of all problems increases this reaction. Those who are willing to fight for their survival and the survival of civilization are routinely vilified with war mongers and murderess being the mildest names.
In the case of the Jews during the diaspora they were forbidden to react in self defense and thus their culture and history taught them to hide or run and hide rather then fight. The Zionist movement gave the ones who wanted to fight back a place to go, other then the US, up until WWII if was hard to find Jews in any military organization, they were usually forbidden to join with the US being the exception. The Holocaust further removed that thought pattern by killing off most of the European Jews who followed that strategy.
Now thanks to the nuclear weapons and the Cold War the left has had time to remove many of the lessons of WWII from the public mindset and to instill the peace at any cost back into the Jews and a lot of the Western non Jewish population. After the unusually long peace between major wars we are once again facing a hot war of survival and way too many people are going to ignore the warning signs until it is too late. Hopefully we can keep the death camps in the Middle East and our of Europe and North America, hopefully.
This war is going to be long and bloody and as I have stated many times I don’t know if civilization will survive. There will be pockets of civilization that are protected by hard men who are acting uncivilized but if to borrow a phrase from Poul Anderson the Long Night is falling on civilization it will be a very nasty time.