Anti-Semitic Incidents Reported Rising : Hate: Attacks and threats increased in both California and U.S., Anti-Defamation League finds.

For the fifth consecutive year, anti-Semitic incidents rose in California and across the country in 1991 as the national total climbed to a record of 1,897, the Anti-Defamation League reported Thursday.

Both in California and throughout the nation, anti-Jewish incidents in 1991 rose 11% from 1990 figures. The violence included the stabbing death of a 29-year-old Jewish scholar in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, N.Y., and the firebombing of a North Hollywood synagogue, according the ADL’s annual report.

Attacks, harassment and threats against individuals in California soared 31%, to 122. Nationally, attacks against individuals jumped 25%, to 950, the report stated.

“It seems to indicate a new willingness to confront individuals with direct, provocative acts, a kind of in-your-face intimidation that allows people to speak directly to others in the most bold kind of hate,” said David A. Lehrer, ADL regional director.

New York, with a Jewish population estimated at 1.8 million, led the nation with 445 reports of anti-Semitic acts. California, home to about 919,000 Jews, ranked second with 246 reported acts. New Jersey, with a population of about 430,000 Jews, followed with 195.

The ADL singled out racial fighting and protests in Brooklyn, which erupted after a black child was killed in a car accident involving a Jewish driver. The racial unrest was “the most dramatic and disturbing anti-Semitic outburst seen in the United States in many years,” according to the report. Yankel Rosenbaum, an Orthodox Jewish scholar, was attacked by a “mob of young blacks shouting ‘Kill the Jew,’ ” the report stated.

The most serious incident in the Los Angeles area was the January, 1991, firebombing of the Yeshiva Aish HaTorah Institute in North Hollywood, which caused $250,000 in damage, according to the report. In Thousand Oaks, Temple Adat Elohim was struck twice by arsonists; the most severe incident caused $8,000 in damage.

The ADL’s Audit of Anti-Semitic Incidents, which for 13 years has surveyed 42 states, also reported that incidents at college campuses in 1991 “remained at the disturbingly high level of 1990,” with 101 anti-Jewish acts at 60 college campus.

Locally, the ADL report cited the publication of anti-Semitic articles in UCLA’s black student magazine, Nommo, as an example of a “troubling atmosphere on campus.” In February, 1991, the magazine printed an editorial supporting a bookseller who distributed “The Protocols of Zion and the International Jew,” a book widely denounced for its discredited anti-Semitic theories.

While acts of vandalism against Jewish-owned property declined 5% in California, they rose 29% nationally, with 49 reported episodes of arson, bombing and cemetery desecration, the report stated.

The organization linked 80 incidents nationally, including hate mailings and swastikas, to tensions during the Persian Gulf War. The report stated that one California country club frequented by Jews received a phone threat stating: “Kill every Jew . . . on behalf of the Iraqi people.”

Lehrer said that events such as a Los Angeles conference last week on the Holocaust and the 1st Amendment--labeled by the ADL and other critics as a “hate fest featuring a who’s who of bigots”--provide a forum for the “the most vulgar kind of hate expressions” and must be exposed and denounced.

He said the only good news in the 1991 audit was the continuing decrease of anti-Jewish incidents by neo-Nazi skinheads. Nationally, 62 such incidents were reported in 1991, down from 116 reports in 1990.

ADL officials attribute the decline to law enforcement crackdowns against such gang activity.