Synagogue attacker's appeal is rejected

By N. Clark Judd

Eight years ago last October, the Second Intifada came to Riverdale.

State Supreme Court Appellate Division judges ruled late last month that one of three men who had tried to burn Conservative Synagogue Adath Israel of Riverdale on the eve of Yom Kippur, apparently to make a statement about ongoing violence between Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews in the Middle East, was guilty of a hate crime.

Mazin Assi, then 21, and his two friends were the first to be tried under that statute, which went into effect just hours before police saw him and his friends loitering in front of the synagogue at around 3 a.m. on Sunday, October 8, 2000.

His appeal was based in part on the premise that the law had not yet gone into effect because October 8, the law’s effective date — and the day of the attack — was a Sunday. Instead, the law was effective only from Monday forward, he argued. That argument was unanimously rejected.

Mr. Assi also argued that his actions could not be considered a hate crime because they had been directed at the synagogue, not at people; that contention, too, was thrown out.

Not long after riots raged at the Temple Mount, with what would become a six-year-long conflict just beginning, Mr. Assi, 18-year-old Mohammed Alfaqih, and a then-15-year-old drove to the synagogue with a fourth man who was not charged, he told police.

In the red Honda Mr. Alfaqih was driving, the group had two bottles of Devil’s Spring vodka, towels, and latex gloves. They made two Molotov cocktails by stuffing strips of towel into the necks and lighting them, juries found.

A congregant at the synagogue arrived later that Sunday morning to find Adath Israel’s plate glass front door partially splintered. One bottle lay singed and shattered; the other didn’t even break.

“A crime against a synagogue or a church or a mosque is a crime against all of the people associated with that institution,” CSAIR Rabbi Barry Dov Katz said last week. “It is an affront to our common humanity.”

He added, “We hope that Mr. Assi understands the pain that he has caused.”

A former Riverdale resident, Mr. Assi’s family lived at West 262nd Street and Broadway until moving just a few blocks north to Yonkers. He attended PS 81 and graduated from Lincoln High School.

He is serving 15 years in a prison upstate and is next eligible for parole in January 2011.

Mr. Alfaqih received the maximum sentence of four years for one count of criminal mischief in the third degree; he was not convicted of the more serious arson and hate crime charges.

The 15-year-old was tried by the city’s corporation counsel in family court.