14-year-old arrested under suspicion of assaulting San Diego rabbi
The suspect was taken in on charges of battery and hate crime charges, and is alleged to have assaulted Rabbi Yonatan Halevy on Saturday, October 10.
By JERUSALEM POST STAFFMale hands arrested with handcuffs in Criminal concept (illustrative)(photo credit: INGIMAGE)
A 14-year-old boy was arrested by San Diego police officers Friday in connection with the violent assault of a rabbi in the city last weekend, the Algemeiner reported.According to San Diego Police Lt. Shawn Takeuchi, the suspect was taken in on charges of battery and hate crime charges, and is alleged to have assaulted Rabbi Yonatan Halevy on Saturday, October 10.According to Halevy, a teenager riding a bicycle hit him on the head and yelled a racial slur at him outside the synagogue in University City, a large residential and commercial district next to the University of California’s San Diego campus.“Everyday they come by here, taunt us, throwing bottles at us, sitting on our roof blasting music, and then breaking a window to my van,” Halevy told San Diego's 10 News at the time. “Last but not least, what happened on Saturday.”Even prior to the attack, the Shiviti Congregation already had been targeted by a group of teenagers for a few weeks, including the suspect. This had seen the synagogue-goers heckled and even resulted in a broken car window, Halevy later told The San Diego Union-Tribune.The ongoing campaign of harassment against the synagogue had even reached the ears of the Anti-Defamation League's regional director, according to the Algemeiner.“We don’t want to be dismissive and say it was just kids,” the ADL’s Tammy Gillies said. “We have to take hate and any hate incident very seriously.”Gillies later labeled the assault against Halevy as a “message crime.”“It doesn’t just impact the target, but it's a message to the whole community that says, ‘We don’t want you here,'” Gillies noted, according to the Algemeiner. “That is the double impact of the hate crime.”Cnaan Lipshiz/JTA contributed to this report.
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