A Bloody Weekend: The Terror and the Tragedy : Services Conducted at Wiesenthal Center for Jews Slain in Istanbul

With pain and sorrow, members of the Los Angeles area Jewish community held a memorial Monday for 21 Jews murdered in an Istanbul synagogue on Sabbath morning, and with anger and outrage, they expressed determination to oppose terrorism wherever it occurs.

“We are here to express our grief and our sorrow and to attempt to understand that a synagogue today is no longer a safe haven for Jews at prayer,” said Gerald Margolis, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in West Los Angeles, where the service was held.

Political leaders, including Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley and Los Angeles City Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky, joined Israel’s consul general in Los Angeles, prominent rabbis, students from Yeshiva University of Los Angeles and members of the public in the observance.

Three Yeshiva students, Ziba Bolour, Bijan Broukhim and Eleanor Broukhim, ignited a flame in the center’s memorial plaza in remembrance of their grandfather, Mizrah Babazadeh, one of those killed in the massacre at Istanbul’s Neve Shalom--Oasis of Peace--synagogue.

Bodies Set Afire

Terrorists invaded the synagogue shortly after 9 a.m. Saturday, sprayed worshipers with automatic weapons fire, doused their victims with gasoline and set the bodies afire. Two of the gunmen died when they apparently committed suicide by exploding three hand grenades.

Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Wiesenthal Center, said the killings were a reincarnation of the World War II death camps of Treblinka and Auschwitz.

“They were butchered in the name of liberation and freedom,” he said of the murdered Turkish Jews. “What response to these murderers who poured gasoline on the martyrs and resurrect the imagery and savagery of the Holocaust? To them we say, the blood of our brothers cry out from the earth.

“To these Nazi butchers we say, it is 1986--this is not 1936--we feel not fear but anger. There will never again be another Holocaust. The state of Israel and the Jewish people will not stand idly by in face of your barbarity. Our loved ones and all victims of terrorism will be avenged.”

Cooper said the killers struck in Istanbul not because of the question of the Golan Heights or East Jerusalem but out of “hatred--of Jews and Judaism which has entered the mainstream of the Arab and Islamic reality.”

He called on the government of Turkey to go beyond words of mourning and solace to its Jewish minority by closing the offices of the Palestine Liberation Organization in Turkey.

“We urge the forces of freedom here and in Israel to deal with the hijackers and thugs in the language they best understand,” he said.

And, he called on the United Nations to convene a special session to deal with “increased anti-Semitism that has taken root in the Islamic world.”

Etian Ben-Tsur, Israeli consul general in Los Angeles, said that terrorists who commit such crimes as murdering praying worshipers are not only enemies of the Jews and Israel but they are the staunch enemies of the United States, democracy and the Western World itself.

Singling out Libya and Syria, Ben-Tsur declared that it is imperative for Western nations to join together to combat terrorism and those who instigate it. He charged that both Libya’s Moammar Kadafi and Syria’s Hafez Assad “preach, advocate and decide acts of terror as the sole means of advancing their goals.”

“We, the Israelis, will never sit in any fatalistic fashion and let terror reign because we hear the outcry of the Almighty: ‘The blood of your brothers cries from beneath the hills.’ And, we are and should be our brother’s keeper.”

Statements from Gov. George Deukmejian, U.S. Sen. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.), Congressman Ed Zschau (R-Los Altos) and state Senate President Pro Tem David Roberti (D-Los Angeles) calling for action against terrorism were read to the audience of about 400.