Worst Fears

New attacks against Jews

Though the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith reported last January that the number of anti-Semitic incidents in the U.S. had dropped 14.9% from 1981 to 1982, complacency seems ill advised. Consider the attacks against Jews in West Hartford, Conn., and one in New York City this summer. The past two weeks brought new incidents in both places.

> It was 5:45 a.m. on Yom Kippur, the solemn Jewish holy day, when Connecticut State Representative Joan Kemler, stirred by the smell of smoke, crept downstairs. Flames were shooting through the living-room wall of her West Hartford home. She quickly routed her husband. Surgeon Leonard Kemler, and their two children to safety and summoned the fire department. Police found two liter-size plastic soda bottles propped against the two-story home; they had been filled with a flammable liquid, possibly gasoline. "It definitely was a case of arson," said Police Chief Francis Reynolds.

The incident was the fourth arson attack against Jews in West Hartford (pop. 61,000), an affluent suburb of Connecticut's capital, in less than six weeks. The first fire badly charred the wooden interior of the Young Israel of West Hartford Synagogue. Four days later, a second blaze gutted Emanuel Synagogue, a few blocks from the site of the first arson. The next day, flames raced through the home of Rabbi Solomon Krupka, spiritual leader of Young Israel. He and his family were away; six guests staying there managed to escape unharmed.

"The investigators strongly feel the arsons are related," said a police spokesman. All of the fires were set in the pre-dawn hours, and three of the four involved accelerants in plastic soda bottles. The incidents have stunned West Hartford; police have beefed up patrols. But no arrests have yet been made.

> After finishing tryouts for the ice-hockey team last week, Donald Spilky, 17, and four other students from Yeshiva University High School in Manhattan headed home by automobile to Queens on the Cross Bronx Expressway. A gunman, or gunmen, followed in a car, sped ahead of them on the expressway, and parked in waiting at an exit ramp. As the students neared the Whitestone Bridge, a volley from a high-powered automatic or semiautomatic M-16-type rifle rang out. One shot missed the students and killed Lucille Rivera, 37, a Queens mother of two who was a front-seat passenger in the vehicle next to theirs. A second blast ripped into the back seat of the youngsters' car, wounding Spilky in the right knee.

The expressway shootout was the fourth attack in 3 1/2 months on Yeshiva students and other Jews in the ethnically diverse north Manhattan neighborhood of Washington Heights. On June 7, four bullets were fired at Yeshiva's five-story brick administration building; two days later, someone fired six .223-cal. blasts at Jewish Memorial Hospital. Neither attack caused more than minor property damage; no one was hit. But two weeks after that four still unidentified people pumped 20 shots from a passing car into a neighborhood luncheonette known as a Yeshiva student hangout, wounding three of the 50 students inside.

Police Commissioner Robert McGuire last week said ballistics tests showed that the high-velocity copper-jacketed bullets fired in three of the incidents came from the same weapon. He assigned 30 investigators to the case. Yeshiva is spending $250,000 to hire Wells Fargo security guards. But few of the 3,500 students at the Washington Heights campus or area residents feel safe. Says Shop Owner Mark Weiner: "I no longer wear my yarmulke [skullcap] when I'm out driving. Now I look over my shoulder to see who's following me." . This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.