Bomb damages Kyrgyzstan synagogue on Rosh Hashana

No one was hurt in the blast, but some damage was caused to the synagogue.

By GIL STERN STERN SHEFLER
An unknown assailant hurled a pipe bomb at a synagogue in Kyrgyzstan’s capital of Bishkek on Thursday, the first day of Rosh Hashana.
No one was hurt in the blast, but some damage was caused to the synagogue, community members said.
“The bomb was laden with nails to cause maximum harm,” Rabbi Arye Reichman, the community’s religious leader, told The Jerusalem Post. “Luckily, they threw the bomb at 17:30, an hour before 100 worshipers came. Many people could have been hurt.”
One reason the homemade explosive device caused relatively little damage was that it landed in a small pond before detonating.
About 1,000 Jews live in the central Asian country, according the American Joint Jewish Distribution Committee which maintains a Jewish community center in the capital.
Last year, during a coup d’état that rocked the former Soviet republic, firebombs were thrown at a local synagogue and anti- Semitic slogans were scrawled onto several buildings in Bishkek.
Reichman said that relations between the Jewish community and Kyrgyzstan’s moderately Muslim majority on the whole were good. Local authorities opened an investigation into Thursday’s incident and have beefed up security around Jewish institutions.
“I hope they find who did it, otherwise we’re in trouble,” Reichman said.