Israeli police announced on Sunday the arrest of a gang of alleged neo-Nazis, all immigrants from the former Soviet Union, accused of waging attacks on foreigners and religious Jews, in a case that has deeply shocked the Jewish state.
The eight men, aged 16 to 21 and including the suspected leader of the group, were arrested after a year-long investigation, police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld told AFP.
One of the members of the group has left the country and remains at large, he said, adding that the first suspect was arrested on July 23 and the last on September 6 when he returned to the country from a trip abroad.
A court in Ramle ordered seven of the suspects to be held for another 48 hours pending a review of the police evidence against them, and was to rule on the eighth suspect on Monday, judicial sources said.
"We want them to be charged with being involved in neo-Nazi activities," Rosenfeld said.
The youths are suspected of carrying out "attacks on religious Jews, Asians and foreigners" and having contacts with neo-Nazi groups abroad, Rosenfeld said.
"It is difficult to believe that Nazi ideology sympathisers can exist in Israel, but it is a fact," Revital Almog, the police official who directed the investigation, told public radio.
Searches of the suspects' homes turned up Nazi uniforms, portraits of Adolf Hitler, knives, guns and TNT, police said.
"We believe that this is the main gang working in the area ... the main gang that exists (in Israel) that attempts to use Hitler's ideology," Rosenfeld said.
The police investigation that resulted in the arrests began in 2006, after someone spray-painted swastikas and Hitler's name on a synagogue in Petah Tikva, a city east of Tel Aviv.
The arrests deeply shocked the Jewish state, where memory of the World War II Holocaust in which six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis runs deep.
The arrests topped the news on radio stations and news websites, and were discussed during the weekly cabinet meeting.
Some members of parliament called for amendments to Israel's Law of Return under which the youths immigrated, while Trade and Industry Minister Eli Yishai said convicted neo-Nazis should be stripped of their citizenship and deported.
"We have to rid ourselves of this Satan who lives in the heart of Israel," he told public radio.
Israel's Law of Return grants citizenship to anyone who has at least one Jewish grandparent. Under the law, hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews immigrated to Israel in the wake of the breakup of the USSR 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.
Police accuse the suspects of going out and targeting "victims who they deemed too weak to complain" and video-taping the attacks, media reported.
One video allegedly shows the youths surrounding a heroin addict, a fellow immigrant from the former Soviet Union who says that he is Jewish.
He is made to get down on his knees and beg "forgiveness from the Russian people for being Jewish and a junky," the Ynet news site reported.
The number of incidents in Israel with a neo-Nazi, fascist or anti-Semitic streak has increased dramatically over the past 15 years, according to the Dmir Centre, which monitors and assists victims of such attacks.
There is no law explicitly banning anti-Semitism in Israel, because legislators never imagined it could ever arise.  
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