Diaspora Jews targeted over a dozen times in March, as Iran war fuels tensions |
Bombings, shootings, arson and a car-ramming: The past month appears to have been one of the most dangerous on record for Diaspora Jewish communities, amid a surge in attacks during the US-Israeli conflict with Iran.
There were at least 14 incidents, attacks or plots that appeared to target Diaspora Jewish institutions in March, ranging across Europe to Canada and the US. The sum amounts to an incident every other day of the month.
Jewish security officials have sounded the alarm repeatedly, saying the threat environment is at a high point, with a record number of calls for violence directed against Jewish institutions.
“From Iran and its proxies to other Islamic extremists and adherents to supremacist and neo-Nazi ideology, the rogues gallery of adversaries we face is diverse but united in one thing — their desire to harm and even end us,” Michael Masters, the head of the Secure Community Network, a US Jewish security group, said at a briefing this week.
The war in Iran started at the end of last month, with an increase in incidents beginning soon after:
On March 2, in Toronto, attackers fired gunshots at a synagogue after a Purim celebration.
On March 6, authorities in Azerbaijan said they had foiled a series of Iranian terror attacks, including against the Israeli embassy in Baku, a synagogue and Jewish community leaders.
The same day, UK police said officers had arrested four men on suspicion of assisting Iranian intelligence by spying on locations and people linked to London’s Jewish community.
Overnight March 6-7, two more synagogues were hit with gunfire in Toronto.
On March 9, a synagogue was damaged in a blast in Liege, eastern Belgium.
An armed assailant rammed a truck into a synagogue while children were in class in Michigan on March 12.
The next day, an explosion outside a synagogue in Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, caused a brief blaze and damage to the building.
Another explosion damaged a Jewish school in Amsterdam on March 14, in what the city’s mayor described as a deliberate attack against the Jewish community.
On March 15, French prosecutors said they had placed two men under investigation for planning a “deadly and antisemitic attack.”
Police in the Netherlands town of Heemstede on March 20 arrested two youths for a suspected arson or explosive attack against a synagogue.
In London on March 23, attackers torched four Jewish community ambulances.
Also on March 23, a man in........