http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/967598.html
Last update - 21:03 24/03/2008
Loving Jesus, fearing the neighbors in Ariel
By Yair Ettinger, Haaretz Correspondent
Tags: Ariel, Israel, Messianic Jews
Police and sappers were once again dispatched to Ariel’s IDF Street during the Purim holiday Friday morning. A few minutes earlier, a man had knocked on the door of the Leibovitz family home and left a cardboard box with the boy who answered the door. “It’s mishloach manot, a Purim gift basket,” explained the visitor before disappearing.
The boy and his older brother trembled with fear. Their parents, who were out of town, ordered the boys by phone to get away from the package and call the police. In another residential building, 50 meters away, a bomb planted in a Purim gift basket had exploded the day before.
“This is not hysteria; it is alertness,” police told the two boys after they finally opened the box to reveal candy and other treats from the ultra-Orthodox Chabad movement in honor of the holiday.
This is only one example of the tension that has gripped city residents after the booby-trapped gift basket injured a boy on Thursday. Those who were most frightened were members of a tiny, almost secretive community that operates in that Ariel building, among other sites in Israel; the “Messianic Jews.” The group had experienced occasional harassment in the form of hostile fliers and demonstrations against Christian missionary groups. But the police investigation into the explosion indicates that they now must also fear religious-based terror.
While sappers dismantled the Chabad package in the neighboring building, several members of the Messianic Jewish community were cleaning up the apartment where the bomb had gone off a day earlier: shattered windows, a splintered dining room table, holes in the walls and the ceiling, and dried blood stains. They refused to speak to the press, and only one person agreed, despite his friends’ protests, to permit Haaretz to enter the scene of a crime motivated by untold loathing.
(snip)
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/916567.html
J’lem church officials suspect extremist Jews behind arson
By The Associated Press
Tags: fire, Church, Messianic Jews
A church in central Jerusalem was set afire before dawn Wednesday and suffered extensive damage, police said.
Arsonists, suspected to be extremist Jews, forced their way into the church and set it afire, church officials said Wednesday.
The sanctuary used by four separate congregations, including Baptists, had been burned down in 1982 by an ultranationalist Jewish group and later rebuilt, said a pastor at the church, Charles Kopp.
(snip)
Congregants at the church include international workers, students and Sudanese refugees who recently entered the country from Egypt, Kopp said. One of the congregations is made up of Messianic Jews, who consider themselves Jewish but believe in Jesus.
In response to the attack, the Israeli office of the Anti-Defamation League, which monitors hate crimes, condemned the attack and called for tolerance.
“The ADL strongly condemned this arson and apparent hate crime,” the New-York based organization said. “We urged authorities to do everything in their power to protect all religious sites and see that the perpetrators of the crime are brought to justice.
The church is located in the leafy, middle-class neighborhood of Rehavia.
Ultra-Orthodox Jewish residents of a nearby area have in recent years begun moving into Rehavia and trying to impose their way of life on the
neighborhood.
(snip)