On the morning of November 18, 2014, two terrorists broke into synagogue services at Kehilat Bnei Torah in the Har Nof neighborhood of Jerusalem and killed six people. In the aftermath, I don’t recall reading or hearing a single remark connecting synagogue attendance with bravery—not from people living in Jerusalem nor from anywhere else in Israel. The response by the American Jewish community to the Colleyville terrorist incident was jarringly different. The hostage-taking at Congregation Beth Israel (from which, thankfully, all of the hostages escaped) struck fear in the hearts of congregants in synagogues located many hundreds of miles from Texas. The titles of two NY Times op-ed pieces speak to this fear: “Will it happen to us?” (a question that writer Sarah Wildman’s 13-year-old daughter asks her) and “For Jews, Going to Services Is an Act of Courage” (by Emory University Professor Deborah E. Lipstadt).
I would like to focus on Lipstadt’s piece, as in it she refers to synagogue security abroad, much as I did in my own piece three years ago after the terrorist attack on Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue. Lipstadt writes about how, outside of the United States, for many decades now one has been able to locate synagogues by the police presence stationed in front of them. In my own piece, written after a trip to Turkey, I remarked upon the heavy security at Istanbul’s Neve Shalom Synagogue. I indicated that now, after the Pittsburgh attack, most American synagogues would similarly professionalize their security operations. I hadn’t realized, until I read Lipstadt’s piece, just how quickly and how fully these new security arrangements would be implemented.
Lipstadt writes that, due to security concerns, the main entrance to her Atlanta synagogue has been locked ever since the shootings in Pittsburgh, and that “you won’t find wide-open doors at any synagogue in Europe or North America.” What’s astonishing to me is to read all this from an American Holocaust studies scholar, whose work I greatly respect, without her then going on to draw some conclusions about the current state of American Jewry. Instead, Lipstadt mainly rehashes the classic rhetoric of the diaspora Jew; she writes: “We are shaken. We are not OK. But we will bounce back. We are resilient because we cannot afford not to be. That resiliency is part of the Jewish DNA. Without it, we would have disappeared centuries ago.”
The following needs to be said clearly: America was supposed to be different for Jews. When government officials, whether mayors, or congressmen, or even the president tell Jews, in effect, “We will protect you,” that is not what America was supposed to be. In America, Jews were supposed to be part of the “we.” The idea that Jews are turning into a protected minority in America is deeply troubling and saddening.
What should be done? I’m not exactly sure. Perhaps the antisemites have indeed won. Not in the sense that it will prevent Lipstadt and others from attending synagogue, but that now American synagogues look like all diaspora synagogues. In the presence of all this fear and all this security there is no use in bragging about how American Jews can proudly proclaim that they had civil rights here from the get-go, adducing as proof George Washington’s famous 1790 “Letter to the Hebrew Congregations of Newport” (in which, significantly, Washington says: “It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights”). Putting up a brave front is something that Jews worldwide are good at, that for two millennia we have learned to be exceptionally good at, but it’s also something that didn’t seem to be demanded of American Jews when I was growing up. It might very well be possible to improve things, but first it needs to be realized that speaking of bravery in connection with synagogue attendance constitutes something of a broken promise to American Jewry. When Americans realize this, Jews as well as non-Jews, there might be ways of moving forward. God bless America.
By Teddy Weinberger
