Man Gets 4 Years for Defacing Yeshiva’s Torah Scroll
A former hotel security guard was sentenced to four years in prison for defacing a Memphis Jewish school’s Torah scroll and prayer books.
Justin Shawn Baker, 25, was sentenced Tuesday in Madison County Circuit Court, according to the Jackson Sun.
Baker pleaded guilty earlier this month, admitting in court to violating the civil rights of students of the Margolin Hebrew Academy’s Cooper Yeshiva High School of Memphis.
He also pleaded guilty to federal charges of damage to religious property and obstruction of religious belief. He will be sentenced on those charges in March.
Baker was arrested in January after the school’s students and faculty showed up for a worship service in a conference room of the DoubleTree Hotel in Jackson and discovered the Torah scroll and prayer books damaged and covered with graffiti, including “Gentiles win, Jews lose” and “Submit to Satan.”
He also admitted to spitting on the Torah. Baker is an Iraq War veteran.
Some 50 high school students and faculty from the school were spending the Sabbath at the hotel on their way to a ski trip in the Smoky Mountains.
A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.
If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
