A group of 23 Jewish youths from Kiryat Arba, the Jewish settlement adjacent to Hebron, were evacuated yesterday by Israeli police when they tried to hold a prayer meeting in a building in Hebron which served as a Hadassah medical center before the 1929 Arab massacre of Jews in that city. The youths, some of them yeshiva students, did not resist the police.
The attempted prayer meeting was the latest in a series of attempts to resume the Jewish presence in downtown Hebron. Earlier this week there was a mass rally in commemoration of the massacre in which 63 Jews were killed. The rest of the town’s Jews left afterwards.
Rabbi Moshe Franco, 80, of Jerusalem, claims ownership of the hospital building in the name of the former Jewish community that lived in Hebron. He said he has given the building to the residents of Kiryat Arba to use as a synagogue or a yeshiva. A group of youths began cleaning the building last week and then returned yesterday in an attempt to pray there.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
