The president of a synagogue in Charlottesville, Virginia described a harrowing scene with armed white supremacists threatening the temple and chanting Nazi slogans during the tumultuous protests that rocked the town on Friday and Saturday.
“For half an hour, three men dressed in fatigues and armed with semi-automatic rifles stood across the street from the temple,” Alan Zimmerman, the president of Congregation Beth Israel, wrote. “Had they tried to enter, I don’t know what I could have done to stop them, but I couldn’t take my eyes off them, either.”
Zimmerman said he was forced to hire an armed guard because the Charlottesville police refused to provide an officer to watch over the temple’s Saturday morning services.
“Several times, parades of Nazis passed our building, shouting, ‘There’s the synagogue!’ followed by chants of ‘Seig Heil’ and other anti-Semitic language,” Zimmerman said. “Some carried flags with swastikas and other Nazi symbols.”
Read the full article by Jeremy Berke at Business Insider Australia.