Neturei Karta Synagogue Burns Down on Eve of Passover

By Erin Calabrese & Hasani Gittens

April 3, 2007 — Federal terror probers yesterday flocked to the site of a controversial, anti-Zionist synagogue in Rockland County that was nearly burned to the ground on the eve of Passover.

The Monsey temple’s leaders - who have been reviled for meeting with Iran’s Holocaust-denying president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in Tehran - said they fear that the blaze was part of “a terrorist attack.”

Still, preliminary findings in the investigation into the blaze at the Neturei Karta sect’s synagogue Sunday night showed no trace of arson, officials said.

With the burned-out structure falling down, only specially trained dogs could be sent in, and they did not detect any accelerants commonly used in arsons, according to Detective Lt. Louis Falco of the Rockland County Sheriff’s Bureau of Investigation.

Before the officials’ preliminary determination, the ultra-Orthodox sect’s leaders vehemently insisted that the spark was deliberate.

“I am 99 percent [certain] that this was a terrorist attack,” said Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss immediately after the fire. “This was a hate crime.”

It happened “because we’re anti-Zionist and opposed to the state of Israel. We were threatened by a terrorist organization the JDO [Jewish Defense Organization] and others,” Weiss charged. (….Full Story Here)
 

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