The Corner Report

On Monday, Israel’s the chief Ashkenazi rabbi, Yona Metzger, visited the West Bank village of Yasuf, where the local mosque was vandalized last week.

By ROBERT MACKEY

On Monday, Israel’s the chief Ashkenazi rabbi, Yona Metzger, visited the West Bank village of Yasuf, where the local mosque was vandalized last week.

Following up on a story The Lede discussed on Friday, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that one of the two most senior religious leaders of Israel’s Jewish community paid a visit on Monday to the West Bank village of Yasuf, where a mosque was set on fire and covered with Hebrew graffiti last week. Israeli and Palestinian officials have blamed the attack on Israeli settlers.

According to Haaretz, Yona Metzger, Israel’s chief Ashkenazi rabbi, told residents, “I came here to expression my revulsion at this wretched act of burning a place holy to the Muslim people.” Agence France-Presse reported that that he drew an explicit comparison to Kristallnacht, the November 1938 attacks on Jewish synagogues and businesses in Nazi Germany. “Seventy years ago,” Rabbi Metzger said, “the Holocaust, the biggest tragedy of our history, began with the torchings of synagogues during Kristallnacht.”

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The Associated Press reported that the rabbi continued: “There were hundreds of synagogues. They took all of the holy books out onto the street and burned them.” He added, “We are still living this trauma. And in the state of Israel we will not allow a Jew to do something like this to Muslims.”

No arrests have yet been made for the attack. That fact seemed more important to some Palestinians in Yasuf than the rabbi’s visit. The A.P. reported that Mahmoud Abu Salah, the former head of the Yasuf village council, said he was glad for the visit but doubted that it would stop what he described as years of harassment from the nearby Israeli settlers. “The government will say the top rabbi came and condemned it, but it still lets the settlers get away with everything,” he said.

In a sign of how tense the situation is in the wake of the attack, Haaretz also reported that Rabbi Metzger and the Palestinian police officers and soldiers from the Israeli Defense Forces who escorted him there “were pelted by rocks from protesters” on their way out of the village.

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/14/rabbi-compares-west-bank-mosque-attack-to-kristallnacht/