Vandalism at Persian synagogue stuns congregation
BEVERLY HILLS — The Torah scrolls lay strewn on the floor of Nessah Synagogue, some wrinkled and unraveled, others thrown on chairs alongside shredded prayer books. Piles of blue and white tallits and kippahs littered the floor, pulled from their cubbies by a vandal who had broken into the house of worship during Shabbat.
Around 7 a.m., an employee arrived to discover the chaos and called the police. By midday, word of the destruction had spread throughout the congregation.
“When my husband came home and told me what happened, I was shocked. The whole community was shocked,” said Simin Imanuel, a longtime congregant.
The vandalism at one of the country’s most prominent Iranian synagogues on Dec. 14 has stunned congregants who said they never thought the anti-Semitic graffiti and intolerance they saw happening at other temples and schools would reach their doorstep.
“Our worst nightmare basically came to light,” said Farzad Rabbany, who has been a member of the Beverly Hills synagogue for years. “This particular synagogue is very dear to the Jewish Iranians that fled the 1979 revolution in Iran, and this is what we call home. It is the largest Persian synagogue in the United States, and perhaps the world.”
The attack comes at a time when the community is especially alert to anti-Semitic violence. Earlier this month, two shooters killed three people at a Jewish grocery store in New Jersey, in addition to a police officer at a cemetery about a mile away. In April, a shooting at the Chabad of Poway synagogue in San Diego County came exactly six months after 11 worshipers were killed at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh.
Rabbany is grateful, he said, that the crime at his synagogue stopped at vandalism.
The synagogue was founded by Rabbi David Shofet, who immigrated to the United States in 1980 from Tehran in the aftermath of Iran’s Islamic Revolution. Shofet aimed to create a place in which Iranian Jews could pray together, maintain the traditions they followed back home and teach the next generation.
“This is the stuff that you don’t think is going to come and affect you personally, but it is unfortunately becoming a fact of life,” said Rabbany, who moved to Southern California in 1987 after fleeing Iran. “As Persian Jews, we have been through it all, and we know what anti-Semitism is. We know the danger of it.”
Hate crimes in Los Angeles County have reached their highest point in nearly a decade, according to an annual report by the Los Angeles County Commission on Human Relations. Although religious crimes overall declined slightly, anti-Jewish crimes rose 14% and constituted 83% of religion-motivated crimes.