2 youths arrested in connection with racist attack

Two Jerusalem teenagers turned themselves in to police late Saturday night in connection with an incident last week in which an Arab woman and her Jewish friend were assaulted in the capital’s Kiryat Moshe neighborhood.

Last Wednesday, Suhad Abu Zamira and a Jewish colleague, Revital Volkov, went to visit their friend who had recently lost a family member, in Kiryat Moshe, but was assaulted in her car by a group of stone-throwing youths.

“They just set upon us, some spat, some threw rocks,” Abu Zamira told Channel 2 News after the incident. The two women emerged from the incident uninjured, but the vehicle sustainted damage.

The assailants also shouted epithets at Volkov, telling her she was “a bitch for going with an Arab,” Abu Zamira said. 

The two teenagers bring the total number of arrests in the attack to three. A 16-year-old boy was apprehended immediately following the attack lask week. Police said the boy admitted that the attack was motivated by racial hatred and claimed he was seeking revenge for a relative who had recently been stabbed by an Arab.

Police said the students suspected in the attack attend the nearby high school of the Mercaz Harav Yeshiva.

Rabbi Yerachmiel Weiss, the dean of the high school, expressed shame and deep regret over the attack allegedly perpetrated by his students. “I am embarrassed and I apologize… for the attack on the woman who came in good faith and had to face this pain… I am ashamed about what happened,” Weiss told Channel 2.

In response to the attack and a spate of other, similar incidents in the capital and elsewhere in recent weeks, the Education Ministry announced last week that schools across the country would devote an hour on Sunday to address the attacks and their “destructive consequences.”

Philip Podolsky and Asher Zeiger contributed to this report.