North American Jewish federations launch security program
Arson attacks, vandalism, the dissemination of anti-Semitic material and packages containing potentially toxic material are just a few of the threats that Jews in North America have faced in recent months.
In response, the community decided to put the issue of synagogical security at the forefront of their concerns, the Israel Hayom daily reported.
According to Rebecca Caspi, director general of the Israeli branch of the Jewish Federations of North America, the anti-Semitic incidents have now passed the stage of online harassment to the point that Jews are the target of verbal abuse and physical.
Ms Caspit recounted an incident in Florida in which four men started yelling at a man wearing a kippah and threatened his family. According to Ms Caspi, in Austin, a synagogue was set on fire and a rabbi was stabbed outside a Jewish school in Boston.
In another incident in recent days, anti-vaccine posters featuring a Star of David were discovered in at least two locations in the Los Angeles area this week, including stuck to an electrical box outside a synagogue. .
The JFNA (The Jewish Federations of North America), which oversees 146 Jewish federations and 300 Jewish communities in the United States and Canada, created the nationally funded “LiveSecure” program in partnership with the United States Department of internal security, in order to provide “local federations with the tools, training and resources necessary to ensure the safety of our summer camps, our synagogues and our classrooms,” according to the JFNA website.
The $ 54 million in funding for the program will allow communities to be connected to a special surveillance and security network that will conduct an intelligence assessment on the extent of threats terrorist and anti-Semitic organizations pose to community members. Jewish, which will classify each community according to the threat it faces.
As part of the security enhancement, synagogues will receive closed-circuit security cameras, secure doors will be installed, and community members will be trained on potential terrorist threats. Private security guards will also be hired for special events and certain communities.
According to Ms. Caspi, these measures have already saved lives. She noted that secure doors installed at the entrance to a synagogue in the German city of Halle had prevented an attacker from entering and carrying out a massacre.
According to the US Civil Rights Commission, the number of anti-Semitic incidents reported in the first half of 2021 doubled from the same period the year before.
–
