Jews prepare to observe Rosh Hashanah as group steps up to secure community amid huge rise in antisemitism
As the Jewish community approaches the High Holiday season, many are concerned about rising antisemitism in the U.S. stemming from Hamas’ Oct 7, 2023, terror attacks on Israel, which resulted in the murder of about 1,200 Israelis and hundreds of innocents taken hostage to the Gaza Strip.
This year’s celebrations of Rosh Hashanah, Oct. 2-4, and Yom Kippur, Oct. 11-12, fall on either side of the one-year anniversary of the attack as Israel fights a multifront war that continues to stoke tensions at home.
The FBI hate crime statistics for 2023, released last week, demonstrate a considerable uptick in antisemitic hate crimes since Oct. 7. The FBI Crime Data Explorer shows a total of 1,951 anti-Jewish hate crimes in 2023, a 55% increase from 1,257 incidents reported in 2022. Of these, 980 incidents occurred between January and September. In the final three months of the year, 971 incidents were reported, an increase of more than 300% over the 318 incidents tallied during the same period in 2022.
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Amid this startling rise in hate, Community Security Service (CSS) CEO Richard Priem told Fox News Digital that he wants Jewish Americans to "be reassured that there’s a lot of competent organizations and individuals, both in government and within the community, proactively working to make sure that these High Holidays will be safe and enjoyable."
The explosion of intolerance has spawned growth within CSS. It took Priem’s nonprofit about a decade to train volunteers to support just under 300 Jewish institutions. Now, CSS partners with 470 institutions, an increase of "30% over the course of 10 months," Priem said.
Some of CSS’s new growth is on college campuses, where anti-Israel protests and encampments created hostile environments for Jewish students throughout the previous academic year and continue to cause chaos this year.
Priem said the CSS campus program, now present on a dozen campuses, is "providing self-defense, awareness and de-escalation training for Jewish students" as part of the larger CSS mission "to make sure that Jewish life can continue unimpeded."
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(Community Security Service)
The CSS model focuses on "empowering Jewish community members to become experts" in securing their institutions. Now, more than 5,000 volunteers stand ready to protect their facilities, which is up from the less than 3,000 last year. With this effort to respond to community needs, "[W]e are stretching the resources that we have to the maximum," Priem said.
But the work has paid off. Priem noted that his team "reports hundreds of incidents every year, many of which are being investigated by law enforcement, some of which actually lead to arrests and federal charges." While most of those incidents went uncovered by the media, ABC 7 Washington, D.C., reported on Dec. 17 that CSS volunteers stopped an attack on Jewish worshipers outside the Kesher Israel Synagogue in Georgetown.
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Community Security Service CEO Richard Priem teaches a course on security at the CSS 2024 annual retreat. (Community Security Service)
CSS volunteers were outside the synagogue when a stranger stepped out of a U-Haul parked near the synagogue entrance, shouted "Gas the Jews" and sprayed worshipers with a substance that was later revealed to be merely fart spray. CSS volunteers documented the incident and engaged law enforcement, which arrested perpetrator Brent Wood. In August, the U.S. Attorney for Washington, D.C., secured an indictment charging Wood, now a fugitive from the law, with "three counts of obstructing by force or threat of force a person’s enjoyment of their free exercise of religious beliefs, while using a dangerous weapon."
The primary force behind the escalating threat to the Jewish community since Oct. 7 is the spillover of hate from continued conflict in the Middle East.
"Because of what’s going on between Israel and Hamas and Hezbollah, there might be people coming to target that synagogue because of something politically they disagree with around a foreign country, but they feel justified in targeting a Jewish institution to express their hatred," Priem said.
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Rosh Hashanah, Oct. 2-4, and Yom Kippur, Oct. 11-12, fall on either side of the one-year anniversary of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack in Israel. (Gregory Rec/Portland Portland Press Herald via Getty Images)
Priem said CSS volunteers have not taken their eye off other threats, like the homegrown extremism of white supremacists like Robert Bowers, who perpetrated an attack that killed 11 congregants at Pittsburg's Tree of Life Synagogue in October 2018. The radical Islamic threat posed by groups like ISIS and al Qaeda also remains a serious concern. On Sept. 4, a Pakistani man pledging support to ISIS was arrested in Canada as he traveled to the U.S. to carry out planned attacks on a New York Jewish center on either Oct. 7 or Oct. 11.
While these threats are diverse and serious, Priem said CSS volunteers are prepared "to work with law enforcement and make sure that [members of the Jewish community] can still enter and arrive to synagogue safely" during Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.
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