No Leads in Beating and Burning of Sexton of Reform Congregation

Police here have not yet caught any of the three men who beat and burned Sexton Buzz Cody of Reform Congregation Emanu-El B’ne Jeshurun when he refused to give them access to the synagogue’s Torah scrolls. Cody was hospitalized and released six days after the attack. The investigation, by a pair of detectives on each of the force’s three shifts, has produced no leads so far.

The incident, on December 7, however, generated a storm of protest when Police Lieutenant William Vogl, who was not assigned to the case, told The Milwaukee Journal that he doubted Cody’s story. After the congregation’s Rabbi Francis Barry Silberg protested this statement, the police department repudiated it, and Police Chief Robert Ziarnik assured the Milwaukee Jewish Council that the case was being investigated.

According to a report in the Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle by its editor, Andy Muchin, 35-year-old Cody, who converted to Judaism 12 years ago, was accosted shortly after 8 a.m. on Saturday morning December 7 in the synagogue’s sanctuary by three men. They demanded access to the Torah scrolls, four of which are stored in the ark behind locked brass doors.

When Cody, who had a key to the ark, refused to open it, the men beat him, then dragged him up the stairs to the second floor, which serves as a storeroom, and choir and organ loft. There, holding a knife to his throat, they cut his hand and leg, tore off his shirt, and poured a caustic liquid drain cleaner on his bare chest, Muchin reported.

Cody kicked one of the men. They fled, taking the $100 they had robbed him of. Cody crawled to the elevator and made it to the lobby, where the janitor found him. He was taken to the hospital with second-degree burns.

The police, who came to the synagogue when Silberg called them, found a can of Iye crystals, a carving knife, two yellow rubber gloves, and a bottle of liquid drain cleaner on the second floor, apparently left behind by the attackers. Silberg told the Jewish Chronicle that Cody had said the attackers had “Middle Eastern accents” and spoke in Arabic. Cody later told police that the men mentioned the initials “PDL.” These initials, said Randy Kahn, Wisconsin coordinator for B’nai B’rith’s Anti-Defamation League, could stand for Palestinian Defense League.

The Chronicle, wrote Muchin, received a telephone call the day before the attack from an unidentified man who, said secretary Pam Burns, had said,”…Defense League is at war with the Jewish community.” A similar declaration by the Palestinian Defense League was received in a letter to a Colorado Springs newspaper in March 1983, according to Kahn.

The attack on Cody followed the unsolved July spray-painting of swastikas and anti-Semitic graffiti on the exterior the Jewish Community Center and the adjoining Helfaer Community Services Building and a restaurant, and a similar incident a year-and-a-half ago involving a suburban synagogue.

ATTACK CALLED ‘MORE THAN ALARMING’

Judy Mann, executive director of the Milwaukee Jewish Council, called the Cody attack “more than alarming” but urged Jews, as she had, as well, after the July incident, to remain calm and keep it in perspective. She said that Police Chief Ziarnik had “reassured” her about the investigation of the Cody attack.

Ziarnik subsequently told the Jewish Chronicle that he did not “know what was at the bottom of this …. We’re going to work at it. Somebody was seriously hurt.” County Deputy District Attorney General Thomas Schneider told the Chronicle that the police department has assured him it believed Cody’s complaint to be valid, but that he would “monitor” their investigation to make sure it was “thorough.”

Schneider added that Det. Vogl had no authority to comment on the case, as he had not been assigned to it. Vogl had said he doubted Cody’s story of the attack on him because “when you’re talking about something involving a radical group, they don’t operate in this manner.”