A Jewish community center in Paris that serves kosher meals to the poor was set on fire early Sunday morning. The soup kitchen, a converted synagogue on the ground floor of a five-story residential building on the Rue Popincourt in Paris\’ 11th District was partially destroyed. Anti-Semitic graffiti, Nazi symbols and references to Islam were found on the center\’s walls.
This is the season of le grand départ, when millions of French people leave for their summer vacation. Eighty-four percent of the French population will be going away on holiday this summer, and there are traffic jams hundreds of kilometers long from Paris to the Riviera.
But this year, as the masses pack their bathing suits, say au revoir to their co-workers and squeeze into crowded trains bound for the sea, Jew haters don\’t seem to be taking a holiday.
It\’s midnight in Milan and we\’re in a taxi racing through the streets to our hotel. We\’ve just arrived from Los Angeles. We\’re hazy and tired from a 24-hour trip that should have taken us 15 and from spending too many hours delayed in Heathrow Airport, with nothing to do but sit on our luggage.
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) plans to construct a grotesquely invasive \”Bus Rapid Transit\” corridor (the term is MTA\’s) along Chandler Boulevard in the East San Fernando Valley, and MTA\’s 300-page-plus environmental impact report (EIR) deceives the public in its effort to whitewash the plan. As one salient example of deceit, the EIR disingenuously tries to hide the rapid- transit\’s impact on community safety, conceding the possibility of increased \”pedestrian/bus conflicts.\”
Two teenage boys were arrested Sun., Sept. 24, in connection with the ransacking of classrooms and painting of swastikas and anti-Semitic graffiti on the walls of the West Valley Hebrew Academy in Woodland Hills.
More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.