Right-wing activists rioted outside a Reform synagogue that was screening a joint Israeli-Palestinian ceremony on Israel’s Memorial Day, mobbing and harassing one woman as others exited under police protection.
Three people were arrested on the scene, according to reports in Israeli media, and several people reported injuries, including police officers.
Rabbi Gilad Kariv, the former head of the Israeli Reform movement who now serves as a lawmaker for an Israeli left-wing party, called the riot an “attempted pogrom.” He tweeted that the rioters threw rocks at attendees and said he had accompanied the deputy director of the Reform movement to the hospital.
The local leader of the Likud Party, the party of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, meanwhile, defended the riot and said in a social media post that it should be seen as “just the opening shot” against the left in her city.
Footage from Tuesday night showed dozens of people, mostly men, crowding the entrance to Beit Samueli-Kehillat Ra’anan, a Reform synagogue in the Tel Aviv suburb of Raanana that is home to a large population of American immigrants. The synagogue was hosting a screening of a joint Israeli-Palestinian memorial ceremony held annually on Israel’s Memorial Day.
The ceremony is organized by two groups seeking to bring together Israelis and Palestinians who reject violence and advocate for peace, including a group of bereaved family members from both societies. It has long been controversial in Israel and is regularly subject to government restrictions and protests from groups that accuse it of equating Israeli soldiers and Palestinian terrorists on Israel’s solemnest day.
This year, the ceremony was held in a secret location but screened in locations throughout Israel by the Israeli-Palestinian left-wing activist group Standing Together. The protest in Raanana was organized by the right-wing nonprofit Btsalmo, which exhorted followers to “not allow supporters of terror to enter Raanana!” The group organized a similar protest at a screening in the southern Israeli city of Beersheba.
Videos posted to social media showed the protesters screaming epithets, including “Nazi” and “whore,” at the attendees, and seeking to block at least one woman from entering. Another video posted by Haaretz reporter Josh Breiner showed dozens of men chasing after a woman as she left the ceremony, escorted by three police officers.
Men spat at her, accosted her and the police officers and, in one instance, threw a garbage can in their path. Members of the mob screamed insults including, “Because of you, soldiers die,” and “Too bad Hamas didn’t take you” — a reference to the hundreds of hostages abducted in the terror group’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
Another video posted by Breiner shows police escorting 30 or so attendees out the door as the shouts of the rioters can be heard outside.
This is at least the fourth time in the past 15 years that the Raanana Reform synagogue has been targeted. It was vandalized in 2010, 2014 and 2016 — the latter two times being defaced by slogans disparaging the Reform movement, equating it to apostasy or threatening its leaders.
The synagogue’s rabbi, Chen Ben Or Tsfoni, shared a post on Facebook following the riot that said, “This evening will be remembered as one of the most shameful days in the history of the city that waves the flag of tolerance and brotherhood.” The post added that the scene was “not brotherhood but hate.”
The riot also drew condemnation from the Israeli-American protest group UnXeptable, which opposes Israel’s right-wing government. It called for rallies in solidarity with the synagogue and statements from Israel’s leaders condemning the violence.
“This wasn’t a protest; it was a pogrom against Reform Jews and anyone who mourns all victims,” the group said in a statement. “Extremists think shattered glass will silence us. They’re wrong.”
Orly Erez-Likhovski, the executive director of the Israel Religious Action Center, the Reform movement’s Israeli advocacy arm, posted on Facebook that she had been injured when a rioter threw a rock at the car in which she was escaping the crowd. She said that even as rioters had briefly breached the synagogue, 60 people had been able to watch the program to its completion.
“I know that the dangerous and racist brainwashed people who demonstrated outside feel threatened by this ritual because it offends their whole perception of the world,” she wrote. “Because it shows that [things] could be different.”
Kariv repudiated the rioters in his tweets. “Hooligans that get a backwind and a blind eye from the trustees of the state, barnburners filled with hate, desecraters of God’s name in public, we will not let you destroy the Third Temple,” he wrote, using a term meant to refer to the state of Israel.
The head of Israel’s Reform movement, Anna Kislanski, had a shorter response. Just past midnight, she posted on Facebook, “Memorial Day eve. An attack on civilians in a synagogue. Very dark days.”
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