The Church of the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes near the Sea of Galilee was set alight on June 18 and anti-Christian graffiti was daubed on its walls.

A crowd-funding campaign by a group of Orthodox rabbis and Knesset speaker Yuli Edelstein raised NZ$20,000 - as at July 27 - for repairs to the church.

"Condemnation is not enough; after a while it loses its credibility," said Elijah Interfaith Institute Director Rabbi Alon Goshen-Gottstein, who is spearheading the effort.

"When Jews reach into their pockets to support a cause, one knows they are serious," he said in a Times of Israel report.

The project received the endorsement of 17 leading Orthodox rabbis.

"The church is visited daily by 5000 people, making this act of vandalism the most visible to date in a series of attacks on religious sites of other religions," a statement from the group said.

"The accompanying graffiti appealed to texts from the Jewish prayer book, making it an attack on explicitly religious grounds."

Last week, Moshe Ya'alon, Israel's defence minister, ordered the detention without trial of Mordechai Meyer, 18, for extremist activities believed to include starting the fire at the Galilee church.

He was one of three extremists detained after Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government was prompted to launch an unprecedented offensive against "Jewish terrorism".

This followed an arson attack by suspected hardline settlers in the West Bank village of Duma last Friday that killed a one-year-old Palestinian toddler and gravely injured his parents and brother.

Meanwhile, Catholic Church leaders in Israel filed a complaint for incitement with the police against the leader of the far-right group Lehava, Benzi Gopstein, after it was reported that he called for churches in Israel to be torched.

Sources

• Times of Israel
• The Telegraph
• Haaretz
• Image: Times of Israel

Fires were lit on June 17 in the monastery section of the Church of the Multiplication, in Tabgha on the Sea of Galilee.

Israeli police said it was arson.

The flames consumed much of the interior of the monastery and destroyed the roof, leaving only charred remains of Bibles and other objects.

Graffiti scrawled in red Hebrew lettering on a wall outside the church read, "Idols will have their heads cut off".

Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely said she condemned the attack "in the strongest terms".

Police detained 16 Jewish settlers, all of them minors, for questioning over the incident and later released them.

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