An Israeli court sentenced eight people to jail terms of between one and seven years on Sunday after convicting them of a series of neo-Nazi attacks on religious Jews and foreign workers that shocked the nation.
The court in Tel Aviv found the eight, who included three who were minors at the time of the offenses, guilty of “neo-Nazi activities” and a spate of attacks that included the desecration of a synagogue, a justice ministry spokesman said.
They were also convicted of “racial hatred” by the court, which found that several members of the gang based in the Tel Aviv satellite town of Petah Tikva had even planned to celebrate the birthday of German Nazi leader Adolf Hitler in a country set up as a refuge for Jews after the Holocaust.
In delivering his verdict, Judge Tsvi Gurkinkel described the attacks as “a grave phenomenon, shocking and horrible, which remind us of the darkest events of the Crystal Night.”
“The fact that they are Jews from the ex-Soviet Union and that they had sympathized with individuals who believed in racist theories is terrible,” he said.
The night of Nov. 9 to Nov. 10, 1938 is known as Kristallnacht (glass or crystal night), when widespread attacks were carried out against Jews and Jewish property across German cities, including attacks on shops, where store windows were smashed.
Gang leader Erik Bonite, who is also known as Ely the Nazi, was sentenced to seven years in prison.
Gurkinkel said it was not possible to hand out “lightweight sentences because Israeli citizens cannot accept the frightening phenomenon revealed by the acts” of the gang.
Known as Patrol 36, the gang operated between 2005 and September last year when police announced that they had broken up the gang.
Israel, which was founded in part in 1948 as a refuge for survivors of the Holocaust and where the memory of the 6 million Jews murdered during World War II runs deep, was profoundly shocked by the revelations.
The accused even videotaped some of their attacks with the intent of posting them on the Internet.
The videos, widely played on Israeli media, show the youths kicking and beating homeless people, drug addicts and religious Jews.
Searches of the suspects’ homes turned up Nazi uniforms, portraits of Hitler, knives, guns and TNT, police said at the time of their arrest.
In the wake of the revelations, some politicians called for amendments to Israel’s Law of Return under which the youths immigrated.
The law grants citizenship to anyone who has at least one Jewish grandparent. Under the law, hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews immigrated to Israel in the wake of the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Out of the nearly 1.2 million immigrants from the former Soviet Union, more than 300,000 do not consider themselves Jews, figures from the immigrant and absorption ministry show.
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