Police continued their search today for the perpetrators of the latest bomb threat yesterday against a southern synagogue in which a shoebox crammed with railroad flares was found after a telephone call. One of the flares was marked with a Ku Klux Klan emblem.
The anonymous call was made to a newspaper reporter, Harold Flagg. The caller said: “Listen carefully. I have just placed four sticks of TNT alongside the synagogue on Flagler Street. It is set to go off in exactly 11 minutes. This is not a hoax.”
Before the 11 minutes were up, police arrived at the synagogue and found the box, connected by a wire to a battery. Detective E.J. McCann said that “there was care taken in the assembly of the thing.” The shoebox and its contents were to be shipped to the FBI laboratory in Washington for analysis, Detective McCann said. He added that it would not be known definitely whether the flares would have ignited until the tests in Washington were completed.
(The American Jewish Congress, in advancing proposals to halt bombings of Jewish institutions, said today that recent anti-Semitic attacks and Southern synagogue bombings are “symptoms of the general outbreak of lawlessness in the South since the Supreme Court desegregation decision.” It emphasized that all approaches to the problem must be sought within the framework of constitutional limitations.)
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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.
