American tourist arrested for damaging

Roman statues at Israel Museum

Vandalism stirs concern about safety of collections amid rise
in attacks on cultural heritage in Jerusalem
Associated Press
Fri 6 Oct 2023 12.47 BST

Israeli police have arrested an American tourist at the Israel Museum

in Jerusalem after he hurled works of art to the floor, defacing two
second-century Roman statues.
The vandalism late on Thursday raised questions about the safety of
the priceless collections and stirred concern about a rise in attacks on
cultural heritage in Jerusalem.
Police identified the suspect as a radical 40-year-old Jewish American
tourist, and said initial questioning suggested he had smashed the
statues because he considered them “to be idolatrous and contrary to
the Torah”.
The man’s lawyer, Nick Kaufman, denied that the tourist had acted out
of religious fanaticism.
Instead, Kaufman said, the man was suffering from a mental disorder
that psychiatrists have labelled the Jerusalem syndrome. The
condition– a form of disorientation believed to be induced by the
religious magnetism of the city, which is sacred to Christians, Jews and
Muslims – is said to cause foreign pilgrims to believe they are figures
from the Bible.
The defendant has been ordered to undergo a psychiatric evaluation.
Officials did not release his name due to a gag order.
With religious passions burning and tensions simmering during the
Jewish holiday season, spitting and other assaults on Christian
worshippers by radical ultra-Orthodox Jews have been on the rise,
unnerving tourists, outraging local Christians and sparking widespread
condemnation. The Jewish holiday of Sukkot, the harvest festival, ends
on Friday at sundown.

An exhibition called The Feast at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, 2 August

2023. Photograph: Xinhua/Shutterstock
The prominent Israel Museum, with its exhibits of archaeology, fine
arts, and artefacts of Jewish art and life, described Thursday’s
vandalism as a “troubling and unusual event”, and said it “condemns
all forms of violence and hopes such incidents will not recur”.
Museum photos showed the marble head of the goddess Athena
knocked off its pedestal on to the floor and a statue of a pagan deity
shattered into fragments. The damaged statues were being restored,
museum staff said. The museum declined to state the value of the
statues or cost of the damage.
The Israeli government expressed alarm over the defacement, which
officials also attributed to Jewish iconoclasm in obedience to early
prohibitions against idolatry.
“This is a shocking case of the destruction of cultural values,” said Eli
Escusido, director of the Israel Antiquities Authority. “We see with
concern the fact that cultural values are being destroyed by religiously
motivated extremists.”
The vandalism appeared to be the latest in a spate of attacks by Jews
against historical objects in Jerusalem. In February, a Jewish American
tourist damaged a statue of Jesus at a Christian pilgrimage site in the
Old City, and in January, Jewish teenagers defaced historical Christian
tombstones at a prominent Jerusalem cemetery.
On Friday morning, about 16 hours after the defacement at the
museum, the doors opened to the public at the regularly scheduled
time.