Israelis Among Wounded In US Synagogue Attack

People attend a prayer and candlelight vigil at Rancho Bernardo Community Presbyterian Church on April 27, 2019, in Poway, California./ AFP


Two Israelis were among the Jews wounded in the weekend attack on a synagogue in California that killed one person and injured three others, an official said Sunday.

An Israeli foreign ministry spokesman said an eight-year-old girl and her 31-year-old uncle wounded in the shooting attack in Poway, north of San Diego, on Saturday were from a southern town bordering the Gaza Strip.

“The two moved from Sderot to San Diego a few years ago,” spokesman Emmanuel Nahshon said in a statement, noting their condition was “good.”

San Diego County Sheriff Bill Gore said both were wounded by shrapnel in the attack on the final day of the week-long Jewish holiday of Passover.

A 60-year-old woman was killed in the attack, with the community’s rabbi wounded as well.

Israeli Diaspora Minister Naftali Bennett called the slain woman, Lori Gilbert Kaye, “a Jewish hero” who threw herself “in the path of the murderer’s bullets to save the life of the rabbi.”

Gore identified the suspect, who was arrested after fleeing the scene, as 19-year-old John Earnest and said he had no prior arrest record.

US President Donald Trump denounced the shooting as a “hate crime”.

Israeli President Reuven Rivlin called the attack “yet another painful reminder that anti-Semitism and hatred of Jews are still with us, everywhere.”

“No country and no society are immune,” he said in a Sunday statement. “Only through education for Holocaust remembrance and tolerance can we deal with this plague.”

The shooting in Poway’s Chabad synagogue came exactly six months after a white supremacist killed 11 people at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue — the deadliest attack on the Jewish community in US history.