Magen Am, a non-profit organization specializing in armed security teams within the Jewish community, alleges that a man attempted to ram his vehicle into a crowd of people partaking in a Sukkot holiday event at Los Angeles’ Shaarei Tefila synagogue Wednesday, according to a report.
The Algemeiner reports:
The crowd of about 20 to 30 managed to jump out of the path of the vehicle before the assailant stopped short in front of a metal gate, yelled “f**k the Jews” and left, the group said.
The group also said that about 20 minutes prior, the man had “canvassed” the event and issued threats, saying, “I’m a real Muslim, I’ll show you what real terrorism looks like.”
The Los Angeles Police Department told The Algemeiner that officers responded to the scene at around 10:57 pm to a call of a possible hate crime, and completed a report for criminal threats.
This is not the first time that Shaarei Tefila and its congregants have been targeted.
In May 2020, Magen Am told The Algemeiner that it had scared off would-be vandals seeking to deface the synagogue amid violent riots over the death of George Floyd.
“They were spray-painting this whole area,” the group member said. “I sent them off. We defended Shaarei Tefila today.”
Richard S. Hirschhaut, the Los Angeles Regional Director of the American Jewish Committee, told the Jewish Journal at the time: “It is deplorable that certain protesters in Los Angeles today resorted to violence and vandalism.”
“Once again we see vile antisemitism being disguised as activism. To vandalize a synagogue during this horrific time does nothing but further divide a broken country,” Liora Rez of the group Stop Anti-Semitism said in a separate statement.