Mayor Tom Bradley denounced the terrorist attack on worshippers at the Neve Shalom synagogue in Istanbul Saturday as “the vicious, unprovoked and unwarranted massacre of people peacefully praying to their God.”
He spoke before some 500 people who joined in a memorial service for the 21 victims. The event was sponsored by the Simon Wiesenthal Center and Yeshiva University of Los Angeles. Bradley observed that “there is no ideology or cause which could ever justify such brutality.”
Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Wiesenthal Center, called the machine gun and grenade attack on the worshippers by terrorists, apparently Palestinian, “a reincarnation of Treblinka and Auschwitz.”
Three students at Yeshiva University High School here–Ziba Bolour and Bijan and Eleanor Broukhim–concluded the service by lighting the Wiesenthal Center memorial flame in memory of their grandfather, Mizrah Babazadeh, who was one of the victims of the Istanbul attack.
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