JERUSALEM: An Israeli court has sentenced eight people to jail terms of between one and seven years after convicting them of a series of neo-Nazi attacks on religious Jews and foreign workers that shocked the nation.
The court in Tel Aviv has found the eight, who included three who were minors at the time of the offences, guilty of 'neo-Nazi activities' and a spate of attacks that included the desecration of a synagogue, a Justice Ministry spokesman said on Sunday.
One of the teenagers was the grandson of Holocaust survivors.
They were also convicted of 'racial hatred' by the court, which found that several members of the gang based in the Tel Aviv satellite town of Petah Tikva had even planned to celebrate the birthday of wartime Nazi leader Adolf Hitler in a country set up as a refuge for Jews after the Holocaust.
In delivering his verdict, Judge Tsvi Gurkinkel described the attacks as 'a grave phenomenon, shocking and horrible'.
'The fact that they are Jews from the ex-Soviet Union and that they had sympathised with individuals who believed in racist theories is terrible,' he added.
Gang leader Erik Bonite, who is also known as Ely the Nazi, was sentenced to seven years in jail.
Judge Gurkinkel said it was not possible to hand out 'lightweight sentences because Israeli citizens cannot accept the frightening phenomenon revealed by the acts' of the gang.
Known as Patrol 36, the gang operated between 2005 and September last year, when police announced that they had broken up the gang.
Israel, founded in part in 1948 as a refuge for survivors of the Nazi Holocaust, and where the memory of the six million Jews murdered during World War II runs deep, was profoundly shocked by the revelations.
The accused even videotaped some of their attacks with the intent of posting them on the Internet.
The videos, widely played on Israeli media, show the youths kicking and beating homeless people, drug addicts and religious Jews.
Searches of the suspects' homes turned up Nazi uniforms, portraits of Hitler, knives, guns and TNT, police said at the time of their arrests.
In the wake of the revelations, some politicians have called for amendments to Israel's Law of Return under which the youths took up Israeli citizenship.
The law grants citizenship to anyone who has at least one Jewish grandparent. Under the law, hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews left for Israel in the wake of the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Out of the nearly 1.2 million immigrants from the ex-Soviet Union, more than 300,000 do not consider themselves Jews, according to figures from the Immigrant and Absorption Ministry.
