The bombing of a Jewish community center here has drawn sharp condemnations from local officials, including the regional police chief, who termed the attack a “crime against the state.”
As police investigated last Friday’s bombing of the center, Jews from the 2,500-member community gathered in larger numbers than usual for Shabbat services the day after the attack in a show of solidarity.
The explosion in Yaroslavl came during the same week that a Jewish center in Smolensk was robbed and daubed with anti-Semitic graffiti.
An explosive charge equivalent to more than 2 pounds of TNT was used in the Yaroslavl attack, a police spokesman said.
Parts of the 80-year-old building housing the community center suffered serious damage as a result of the explosion, which caused no injuries.
“Dozens of people, many of them just neighbors, came to help us with cleaning up the place,” said Inna Davidova, director of the Hesed Charitable Society and member of the community’s executive board.
Davidova said she was surprised by the larger than usual turnout for services on Saturday, with some people attending for the first time since the synagogue was reopened two years ago.
“People wanted to express their solidarity,” Davidova said.
All 60 students of the center’s Jewish Sunday school came to class Sunday, said school director Nadezhda Nosova.
She said that no more than 40 children usually come to school each Sunday.
“But last Sunday was a different case,” she added.
The chief rabbi of Russia, Adolph Shayevich, who visited Yaroslavl on Tuesday, spoke of the grave concerns such incidents raise within the Russian Jewish community.
“Today most Russian Jews are those who would prefer to stay here,” said Shayevich. “But every such act emotionally disturbs the Jewish community.”
Two Jewish families are leaving Yaroslavl each month, with most of them going to Israel.
Leaders of the community said they would not be surprised if this number soon increased.
The community center is located in a synagogue that was erected in 1916. In 1934, the building was confiscated by local Communist authorities. The Jewish community recovered the property in 1994.
Along with a synagogue, the center houses local organizations that serve the needs of the Jewish community in Yaroslavl, located about 130 miles northeast of Moscow.
The explosion, caused by a bomb planted outside the center, shattered all the windows in the building and in some neighboring houses.
An office of the Hesed society and a room that served as the community library suffered the worst damage.
Investigators said they believed that the explosion was merely an act of hooliganism.
But community leader Isaac Davidov said he has asked the investigators not to ignore the fact that Yaroslavl has a community of several dozen Lebanese and Syrian college students.
Davidov said that even though he had no evidence, he believed that some of the students might have wanted to attack local Jews after the April 18 shelling by Israeli forces of a U.N. base in southern Lebanon in which at least 91 Lebanese refugees were killed.
Jewish leaders said the bombing had caused $12,000 worth of damages.
On Tuesday, Yaroslavl city administrators allocated $2,000 to the community. The Russian Jewish Congress is expected to provide the remainder of funds needed to repair the building.
Last week in Smolensk, a city of 400,000 located about 220 miles southwest of Moscow, robbers broke into the Jewish cultural center and painted a swastika and a Star of David, along with the words “beat the kikes” on the center’s front door.
According to Dimitri Levant, chairman of the Smolensk Jewish cultural center, “There wasn’t much in the office that robbers could take.”
He added that they made off with a television set and some bottles of kosher wine that were left after Passover.
The Smolensk center, which occupies a few rooms on the ground floor of an apartment building, had opened a month before the incident took place.
Levant said the center has been working primarily as a charitable institution serving the 2,000-member Jewish community’s needy.
The center also houses a Sunday school, community library, Jewish youth club and the local office of the Jewish Agency for Israel.
Levant said some citizens of Smolensk had been making more ultranationalist and anti-Semitic statements than in the past.
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