Israel Flag Ripped Away in Front of Vienna City Temple: Police Researched Suspects

Der Standard, October 22, 2023
German original: https://www.derstandard.at/story/3000000192170/video-zeigt-wohangriff-auf-wiener-synagoge

A video circulating on social media shows the Israeli flag being torn down. The object protection for the synagogue was extended to 24 hours.

A video of what appears to be a politically motivated attack on the Vienna City Temple, which has been circulating on X, formerly Twitter, since Saturday evening, is causing a stir. The video, taken on Tiktok and shared on X by Bini Guttmann - a member of the executive council of the World Jewish Congress - shows three people. While a man with the help of a second person tears down the Israeli flag of the city temple, a woman imitates a machine gun. The incident was confirmed to the "Kurier" by the Vienna Regional Police Directorate. It is said to have occurred from Friday to Saturday at 2 am.

As the Vienna Provincial Police Directorate announced in a statement on Sunday afternoon, it has since been possible to identify a suspect. The 17-year-old had already been questioned and confessed to the damage to property. However, she denies the accusations of incitement to hatred. She claims to have met the other two perpetrators only shortly before the incident. They are to have moved her to the action. In addition, the young woman stressed that she had been heavily intoxicated. The Austrian citizen was reported at large. According to police, investigations are underway into the other suspects.

In a previous release, it was stated that the criminal investigations are being conducted by the Vienna State Office for the Protection of the Constitution and Counterterrorism. Investigations are being conducted on suspicion of incitement to hatred, damage to property and bodily harm, it said.

Last night there was an anti-Semitic attack on the Vienna City Temple. Amid hooting, one person tore down the Israeli flag the synagogue had hoisted, another person imitated a machine gun.

The situation is serious also for Jews:Jewish women in Europe. pic.twitter.com/kfGscFBt5Q

- Bini Guttmann (@Bini_Guttmann) October 21, 2023

Witness tried to stop person

According to police, passers-by tried to stop the persons after the incident. According to the report, a witness had tried to stop a person. During the attempt, he is said to have been stopped by several unknown persons and beaten by one man. As a result, he was injured in the face. The flag was seized by officers who had been alerted in the meantime. A backup of videos from cameras in the immediate vicinity of the crime scene was arranged.

E-mail to LPD Vienna

Object protection for the main synagogue has since been extended to 24 hours, according to a statement from the Vienna police Sunday morning. However, the Vienna Regional Police Directorate (LPD) previously rejected increased protection for synagogues and houses of prayer, according to the Courier. The report cites an e-mail on behalf of the DSN on Oct. 12 from the State Office for the Protection of the Constitution and Counterterrorism. According to the report, five days after the attack by Islamist Hamas on Israel, the DSN demanded that houses of prayer and synagogues in Vienna be continuously monitored. In a response a day later, the LPD Vienna had revoked all measures for permanent surveillance on behalf of the provincial police chief Gerhard Pürstl. Pürstl had resisted the recommendation of the secret service and stressed that he was only bound by instructions from the Ministry of the Interior.

The LPD Vienna rejected the statements of the "Kurier" report in a dispatch. The mail available to the newspaper refers to a one-time object protection-related security measure commissioned by the DSN on the evening of 12.10.2023 due to an abstract risk situation. This had been valid only on 13.10.2023 for the following 24 hours.

On Oct. 18, the Interior Ministry raised the terror alert to the second-highest level. At a press conference with DSN Director Omar Haijawi-Pirchner, and Defense Minister Klaudia Tanner and Military Commander Kurt Wagner, Interior Minister Gerhard Karner (ÖVP) stressed that the "visible presence in front of Jewish institutions" had been increased in the days before. Personnel resources were to be increased for this purpose.

Karner: "Priority is protection of people".

On Sunday, Karner defended the behavior of the executive, which has so far been present (at least visibly) only during the opening hours of the synagogue. The Minister of the Interior was a guest on ORF's "Press Hour," where the attack on the Vienna City Temple was also a topic. Asked how such an incident could happen, the minister first replied that the incident was "to be condemned in the strongest possible terms." He said he had already spoken to Oskar Deutsch on the phone. "The priority was first of all the protection of people," not the protection of objects. However, he said, one was aware that the synagogue in Seitenstettengasse was a particularly sensitive place. Initially, the focus had been on protecting the Jewish population of the Jewish community, but in light of recent events, property protection was expanded. In addition, Karner said that important information is not shared by mail traffic.

The police stressed that the focus of the surveillance "in coordination with the religious community" was on the protection of people who were there during the prayer and opening hours of the temple. Now the object protection has been changed to permanent surveillance.

Flag flies again

As the president of the Israelite Religious Society Oskar Deutsch emphasized, the religious community had raised the flag in memory of more than 1,400 murdered and 200 deported. He called the pulling down of the flag an "anti-Semitic, terror-glorifying act."

A flag was raised again Sunday afternoon. "We won't let it get us down," Deutsch wrote in a post on Platform X.

The #Israel flag is flying again at the IKG building in Seitenstettengasse - in solidarity with Israel and in memory of those murdered and deported. A second flag has now also been installed. We won't let it get us down!#AmIsraelChai! pic.twitter.com/YGxPG59K1D

- Oskar Deutsch (@DeutschOskar) October 22, 2023

According to the Israelite Religious Community's anti-Semitism reporting center, 76 anti-Semitic incidents were reported in the first 13 days since the start of the war between Hamas and Israel. "Compared to the incidents reported in the entire year of 2022, this represents a 300 percent increase," the head of the reporting office, Benjamin Nägele, said in a statement. (awie, rroi, wisa, APA, 10/21/2023)