On Sunday night, vandals forcibly entered a shul situated within a public bomb shelter on Bat Yam’s David Remez Street, desecrating a Sefer Torah by throwing it onto the floor and stomping on it.
The perpetrators, using electric tools, managed to saw open the aron kodesh, seemingly aware that the noise would go unnoticed due to the shul’s location within a bomb shelter.
The damage was discovered early the following Monday morning when mispallelim arrived for Shacharis. Police were called to the scene, but according to the mispallelim, the officers who arrived showed little concern and left shortly afterward, telling those affected that they could file a formal complaint at the station if they wished.
Avichai Shalom, one of the mispallelim, expressed his belief that the vandalism was politically motivated, asserting, “No Jew would invest so much time in breaking into the aron kodesh only in order to desecrate the Sefer Torah.”
He also mentioned that the shul had been recently renovated, with the workers being Arab. “The scene at the shul was horrific,” he remarked. “A Sefer Torah was thrown on the floor and its leaves of parchment were torn. The additional aronei kodesh in the shul were broken into, but other than the two tzedakah boxes, nothing was stolen.”
He pointed out that the shul had been converted into a bomb shelter to make it more useful for the local residents, who had been using it frequently during the war whenever sirens sounded throughout the city.
The gabbaim are now awaiting forensic investigators to arrive at the scene, and they stated that they would repair the damages and continue to hold tefillos there.

{Matzav.com Israel}