World News

After recent attacks, Jewish interest in active shooter training has soared

BY ERIC BERGER

JTA

When the newly established Community Security Initiative in New York began offering active shooter response trainings shortly after it was founded in February 2020, there seemed to be limited interest among synagogues and local Jewish institutions.

Over two years, only about five area Jewish institutions underwent such trainings, according to Mitch Silber, executive director of the Jewish community program.

But then one Shabbat morning this past January, a British Pakistani man took four people hostage at Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas, threatening their lives for over 11 hours before the rabbi orchestrated a daring escape.

At an opportune moment, Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker yelled at the hostages to run and threw a chair at the perpetrator, enabling him and the two remaining hostages (one had been released hours earlier) to escape alive. An armed tactical team then entered the synagogue and fatally shot the terrorist.

Afterward, Cytron-Walker said he and the other hostages survived because of the active threat safety training they received.

“For the past few years, we’ve had training — it’s not training, it’s, I guess, courses, instruction — with the FBI, with the Colleyville Police Department, with the Anti-Defamation League, with Secure Community Network, and they really teach you in those moments that if you’re when your life is threatened, you need to do whatever you can,” he said in an interview with CBS TV. “To get to safety you need to do whatever you can to get out.”

The Colleyville episode reverberated in the New York Jewish community. In the days that followed, the Community Security Initiative received about 75 requests for active threat training from leaders of synagogues, day schools and other Jewish institutions, according to Silber, who previously worked on an initiative assessing the threats to Jewish communities in Europe for Jewish businessman and philanthropist Ronald Lauder and as director of intelligence analysis for the New York City Police Department.

Amid heightened worries about threats to the Jewish community, Silber’s organization — established by UJA-Federation of New York and managed in partnership with the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York — has worked to meet that demand and provide those who work in and use Jewish institutions with the know-how to feel, and hopefully be, less vulnerable to such attacks.

The deadly July Fourth parade shooting in the heavily Jewish Chicago suburb of Highland Park, Ill., underscores the dangers not just to Jews, several of whom were among the victims, but to Americans anywhere.

The Community Security Initiative has eight people who provide trainings to synagogue leaders, clergy, teachers and congregants, among others. During a typical session, an instructor reviews past shooting incidents, such as the 2019 attack in California at the Chabad of Poway synagogue, where one woman was killed and three others were injured.

“Among a number of issues, we discuss what have proven to be the behaviors and the actions, taken by people in these situations that have been predictive of a higher possibility of survival,” Silber said.

The instructors discuss creating “a culture of security” — which means, for example, establishing a security committee that might include clergy, maintenance staff and local law enforcement.

“When you think about your favorite athlete or team or musician, do they get good at what they do and then stop practicing? No, certainly not,” Bill Hayes, the Community Security Initiative’s Westchester and Bronx regional security manager, said during a recent virtual training. “Likewise, security is not a spectator sport. It requires the full involvement of the entire community.”

Hayes and others also emphasize the importance of access control.

That means considering how to scrutinize those who should be scrutinized while not impeding or interfering others or creating an environment that creates a negative vibe for those who should be inside the building, Hayes explained.

If an assailant manages to enter the building, the choices are: “Run. Hide. Fight” and they are not necessarily sequential in their utility.

The goal is to “buy time and save ourselves until police come,” said Liron Filiby, regional security manager for Long Island.

Trainees also practice possible responses to an attack.

“If you evacuate, where do you go?” Filiby said. “If you’re hiding, how do you do that? How do you close the door? Do you have a lock on the door? If you’re fighting, how do you fight? Now, we are not teaching people how to fight. We are teaching them the principle of where to position themselves against an attacker to delay his entrance to the safe shelter-in-place area.”

UJA-Federation of New York decided to invest in the Community Security Initiative after the 2018 shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, which left 11 victims dead in what was America’s deadliest-ever antisemitic attack, as well as the attack against a Chabad in Poway, California, that left one dead.

But those assaults didn’t result in the same demand for active threat trainings, Silber observed. He conjectured that perhaps the outcome in Pittsburgh was so horrific that Jews around the country didn’t realize the utility active shooter trainings can have.

“Even though they had had some training,” Silber said of the Tree of Life congregation, “and even though that mitigated it from being worse, I don’t think the message that the broader Jewish community in the United States took from that was: Do this training. It will be helpful.”

But in Colleyville the circumstances were different: The rabbi’s actions clearly made a difference.

“I think that unfortunately being Jewish in 2022 in the United States means that you need to be prepared for events that that have, unfortunately, become way too common,” Silber said.

In 2021, more than 2,700 antisemitic incidents in the United States were reported to the Anti-Defamation League and its partners, according to the group’s annual report, 34% more than the ADL tallied in 2020 and the highest number since the organization started tracking such incidents in 1979.

The Community Security Initiative also monitors online threats, employing a threat intelligence analyst who scours both mainstream social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, as well as darker corners of the internet.

The analyst looks for postings that may merit alerting law enforcement about a possible threat — for example, if there appears to be a clear and present threat or if a specific institution is named. The public can also play an important role by reporting antisemitic posts to the Community Security Initiative.

During an in-person training at The Community Synagogue in Sands Point, N.Y., Filiby showed staff safe places to hide and provided tips such as closing the blinds during an attack, recalled Jeff Rembrandt, the Reform congregation’s executive director.

“Most shooters are looking for easy targets,” said Rembrandt, who has participated in several trainings. “They are not shooting into rooms where they don’t know what is going on. So close the window blinds, lock the door, and you make it a hard target.”

At Kehillath Shalom Synagogue, a Reconstructionist congregation in the woods of Huntington, N.Y., participants of a training course asked Filiby whether they should run out the front or the back door during an attack, recalled Rabbi Lina Zerbarini.

Filiby said recent assailants have entered through the front door, but the guidance, of course, is to run in the opposite direction of the attack. He also emphasized the importance of routinely conducting drills, Zerbarini said.

Based on Filiby’s recommendation, the congregation placed shades on its front windows.

“We are trying to work out the balance of not feeling like we are in a fortress,” Zerbarini said, “not feeling like we have to isolate from the world, not feeling like we have to exclude other people — but also being realistic.”

This story was sponsored by and produced in partnership with UJA-Federation of New York, which cares for Jews everywhere and New Yorkers of all backgrounds, responds to crises close to home and far away, and shapes the Jewish future. This article was produced by JTA’s native content team.

Mitch Silber, executive director of the Community Security Initiative, runs an active threat training program at a U.S. synagogue.

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Harassment at a Western Wall bar mitzvah renews the fight over prayer spaces in Israel

BY ANDREW LAPIN

JTA

The video taken at the mixed-gender prayer space at Israel’s Western Wall is brief, but the incident it captured has left a lasting impact.

A group of Jews are celebrating a bar mitzvah at the Kotel’s egalitarian prayer space. Dozens of haredi Orthodox men and teenage boys enter the scene and aggressively harass and intimidate the participants: shouting down the prayers, calling the gathered Jews “Nazis,” “animals” and “Christians,” and ripping up their prayer books.

As one of the boys celebrating his bar mitzvah continues with his service, a haredi boy blows his nose with pages from the prayer books.

The incident that took place June 30 was only the latest in an ongoing series of harassment of non-Orthodox Jews by haredi men opposed to egalitarian prayer at the Wall and Israel’s other holy sites. (Just prior to the bar mitzvah disruption, the activist group Women of the Wall had been blocked from bringing a Torah into the women’s plaza, as it seeks to do monthly.)

Yet two things set it apart: its location, at the tiny, peripheral plaza that has been carved out as a safe haven for non-Orthodox Jews who want to pray in a mixed-gender setting at Judaism’s holiest site, and the crudeness captured on camera. Those details have prompted especially strong and lasting reactions — a denunciation from Israel’s prime minister and a fierce debate over whether the U.S. State Department should treat harassment of Jews by other Jews as antisemitism.

“Israel is the only Western country in which Jews don’t have freedom of worship,” Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid said Wednesday from Paris in response to the incident, according to Israeli media outlets.

Deborah Lipstadt, the Holocaust scholar and newly appointed State Department antisemitism monitor, suggested that what took place at the Western Wall was indeed antisemitism.

“Let us make no mistake, had such a hateful incident — such incitement — happened in any other country, there’d be little hesitation in labeling it antisemitism,” Lipstadt wrote from the State Department antisemitism office’s official Twitter account.

Lipstadt’s role carries no authority to penalize or otherwise act in response to antisemitism abroad. But her voice carries weight in public discussions of antisemitism, allowing others to cite a top U.S. government official in making their own cases.

While Lipstadt hedged on actually labeling the Kotel incident itself antisemitic, a person familiar with her thinking told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that the encounter fit the International Holocaust Remembrance Association’s widely adopted definition of antisemitism, which could help determine how the international community responds to it.

“It’s classic antisemitism under the IHRA definition, there’s dehumanizing, there’s Holocaust distortion — calling Jews Nazis falls under the scope of denial, denying the mechanisms and intentionality of the Holocaust,” said the person, who asked to remain anonymous to speak frankly.

“Tearing pages of a siddur and blowing your nose in it is classic. The only thing that confuses people is that Jews are doing it. The IHRA definition doesn’t say it applies only to non-Jews.”

The IHRA definition of antisemitism has been controversial because of its inclusion of some forms of anti-Israel rhetoric and activity. Its invocation in fights among Jews could open another front for debate.

Jews on both the right said Lipstadt should not wade into the Kotel dispute from her official position as antisemitism monitor.

David Friedman, former U.S. ambassador to Israel under President Donald Trump, said Lipstadt should focus instead on threats posed by non-Jews.

“The Jewish people need to fix this internally, it’s our collective problem — you should focus instead on external threats,” Friedman tweeted, adding that he found the harassment at the Kotel “deeply disturbing.”

The Orthodox publication Ami Magazine also tweeted that Lipstadt’s office had “undermined the gravitas and significance” of the concept of antisemitism by using it to refer to “Jewish infighting.”

On the left, Abe Silberstein, a progressive commentator on Israel issues, told JTA that dealing with the incident as antisemitism, as opposed to “Jewish extremism,” ignored a “difficult truth.”

Since demonstrations against non-Orthodox Jews are routinely encouraged by haredi politicians and media who are opposed to egalitarianism, they require different tactics from dealing with outsiders who hate Jews, he said. (Silberstein works for a nonprofit focused on civil society in Israel but said he was speaking as an individual.)

“By invoking antisemitism, I am afraid we bolster the illusion that this is something that can be disowned without confronting it,” he said. “Calling the actions of these boys antisemitic is misidentifying the symptom while failing to diagnose the problem.”

But others believe that treating haredi harassment of non-Orthodox Jews as a form of antisemitism is appropriate and important.

“Is it antisemitic to attack Jews engaging in Jewish ritual at a Jewish holy site? When you phrase it that way, the answer is clearly yes,” David Schraub, a law professor at Lewis & Clark University who writes frequently on Jewish issues, told JTA. “The only reason why it wouldn’t be is if you think it gets some sort of exception because of who the attackers are.”

Tensions surrounding prayer at the Western Wall have long drawn attention from non-Orthodox Jews, including from outside Israel. Arie Hasit, an influential Israeli Masorti/Conservative rabbi who was working with the American bar mitzvah celebrant, posted on Facebook that he was “broken” over the haredi youths’ treatment of the bar mitzvah group.

“Some people hate me. Who are willing to hurt me. Because my Judaism is different from their Judaism,” Hasit wrote in Hebrew.

Lapid, a longtime proponent of egalitarian prayer in Israel, condemned the harassment. “I am against all violence at the Western Wall against people who want to pray as their faith allows them,” he said. “This cannot continue.”

Lapid’s statement followed pressure from American Jewish groups, both reli-

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See WESTERN WALL on page 19

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