PHOTO LINK BELOW: Authorities were still considering offering a reward for information leading to an arrest in connection with arson at a chasidic girls school in Union City.
Last Thursday evening two individuals cut through the gate of the Bnos Sanz Girls School and set fire to a desk outside the building. A 5-year-old student living across the street from the school noticed the fire and alerted her father, head of the city’s Hatzolah volunteer ambulance service. Within minutes he extinguished the flame, but not before the perpetrators ran off.
According to police, early reports that the vandals had set up a burning cross on the desk were false, while New Jersey’s Anti-Defamation League office has been in touch with Union City officials should the attack be considered a hate crime.
“It’s too soon to tell because all we know at this juncture is there was a fire at a school that has a Jewish base,” said Debbie Simon, Hudson County deputy first assistant prosecutor. “There were no messages left that would imply there was a hate crime or anything outside the fact that the fire occurred at an Orthodox Jewish school.”
On Tuesday, Simon reported that the leads the Union City police were following had not panned out and the investigation would continue. She supported a suggestion from the ADL that the police offer a reward for information. A decision on whether to offer one was expected midweek. Rewards have worked in the past with similar cases, according to the ADL.
“Until somebody’s apprehended for this, there’s always the anxiety that the perpetrators are free,” said Etzion Neuer, director of the ADL’s New Jersey office. “And until we know what the motivation is, we still have a concern that a Jewish institution was targeted because of what it stands for, what it represents.”
Once an arrest is made, Simon said, a determination of the nature of the crime would be forthcoming.
“We’re still not 100 percent sure that this event is going to be found to be a hate crime,” she said. “We’re keeping all doors and avenues open.”
While the attack may turn out not to be anti-Semitic, Neuer recommended that other Jewish organizations call their local police departments for evaluations of their security. “Institutions tend to only review these precautions around High Holiday time,” he said. “We see incidents can happen any time of the year.”
Click HERE for photos.
(Source: NJ Jewish Standard – LINK)
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2 Responses
Pretty silly to think that it wasn’t anti-Semitic. How often do people light fires at the entrances to other schools? Cutting through the gate to get to the building? Why not light a fire at another school, or another place, where they would not have to cut through a gate/fence?
Chasdei Hashem, that this 5-year old girl saw it and told her father. Maybe thanks to her, the school was saved from destruction, R”L.
The man with clutches in the pictures is distant family of me, by the way.
There’s no question that a burning cross is a hate crime. If swatstikas had been found on the school, no one would think it was anything but a hate crime. But burning crosses have been used to threaten & intimidate for much longer than swatstikas have.