Cape Town | Tuesday
A CAPE Town rabbi on Tuesday condemned an attack on a Jewish doctor at his practice in Athlone, on the Cape Flats, on Monday.
A Cape Town newspaper reported that the doctor was taken to hospital after alleged Palestinian supporters attacked him with a stick. The doctor was recovering in a Cape Peninsula hospital.
The paper quoted a patient as saying three men wearing checked Palestinian scarves approached the doctor and attacked him shouting insults that Jews were the ones making the trouble in the Middle East.
The attack comes in the wake of tensions over the Middle East conflict.
Rabbi David Hoffman said the attack was not only a threat on the doctor’s life but also on his livelihood.
What these thugs have done is to send a message to the people in the community that their lives were also in danger, Hoffman said.
”Quite frankly when the racism conference ends in Durban a lot of this stuff will settle down and hopefully this man can have a life again,” Hoffman said.
He said the Jewish Board of Deputies had not divulged the name of the doctor and Jewish wisdom was to let people heal when they are ”in this situation.”
He said journalists had to respect the doctors wishes. He apparently did not want to lay a charge.
”Journalists have got to respect that. I think rather than go fishing for detail, respect the wishes of the physician and let him heal so that people will not be afraid to go to his practice,” Hoffman said.
He said the Jewish people wanted peace with their neighbours in the Middle East and in South Africa and the less said about the alleged attack the better.
Police representative Captain Jacques Wiese said Western metropole area commissioner Raymond Strydom had taken note of the attack on the doctor. who was assaulted and robbed of R170 by four men.
Wiese said a police officer saw the doctor shortly after the attack was reported to radio control by telephone. He said the doctor declined to give a statement or register a complaint but local detectives had nevertheless opened a case involving robbery and are investigating the incident.
Wiese said the doctor was in hospital but had requested that details concerning his name and the hospital where he had been taken as well as his practice, be withheld.
– Sapa