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Burned-out door of Geneva's Hekhal Haness Synagogue.
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| By israelinsider staff May 25, 2007 |
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Fire severely damaged Geneva's largest synagogue on Thursday, but police have backtracked from an earlier assertion that arson was the most likely cause. An electrical fault, they say, may have been the cause. But local residents were not convinced.
No one was injured in the fire at the Hekhal Haness Synagogue in the city's Malagnou neighborhood, nor were Torah scrolls or other sacred items damaged. The blaze struck on the holiday of Shavuot. Despite the devastating fire, worshippers at the synagogue prayed in an inner courtyard Thursday morning.
"I don't think anything like this has ever happened in Switzerland, at least as long as I can remember," said Samuel Althof, a spokesman for the Swiss association Children of the Holocaust, which monitors anti-Semitic acts in Switzerland.
"There's been graffiti, destroyed windows and cemeteries desecrated," Althof said. "But it would be unprecedented in this country if a whole synagogue were nearly burnt down" in an anti-Semitic act.
More than 40 firefighters were called to extinguish the blaze, which was first reported early Thursday morning. A police spokesman said that the investigators' first impression was that it was arson, but a statement later in the day indicated that police also were checking the possibility that the fire could have been caused by a "technical problem," noting that "a big circuit-breaker box was found in the area where the fire originated."
Anti-Semitic acts have been on the rise in Switzerland. Graffiti was scrawled on a Geneva synagogue last year. A synagogue and a Jewish-owned clothing store were set afire two years ago in the Italian-speaking city of Lugano in what the police described as cases of arson. The authorities later ruled, however, that these attacks were not anti-Semitic; Jewish groups criticized that finding. |
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