MINNEAPOLIS — “The Socialist Workers Party calls on all working people and our unions to protest the Jew-hating attack on Temple Israel in Minneapolis,” Kevin Dwire, the SWP candidate for mayor, and Edwin Fruit, the party’s candidate for Minneapolis City Council, wrote in a letter of solidarity to Marcia Zimmerman, the temple’s senior rabbi, Oct. 9.
Hamas supporters spray-painted Jew-hating threats on the walls of the synagogue days earlier. They wrote, “Al-Aqsa Flood,” Hamas’ name for its Oct. 7, 2023, massacre of some 1,200 Jews in Israel, and drew inverted triangles, the symbol Hamas uses to identify targets for murder.
The attack on the temple “came on the second anniversary of the deadliest pogrom against Jews since the Holocaust. It occurred hours after a rally in downtown Minneapolis of Hamas supporters who called for the destruction of Israel,” Dwire and Fruit wrote. The SWP candidates will continue to “speak out against Jew-hatred and in defense of Israel’s right to exist as a refuge for Jews.”
Jew-hating comments on social media are “disgusting,” Tyrell Cunningham, 20, told Fruit and this worker-correspondent as we campaigned door to door here Oct. 10. Cunningham, who works as a cook in an elder-care residence, told us he had heard about the attack on the synagogue. He got an introductory subscription to the Militant.