Uncategorized
A Jewish group’s tip led to arrest of suspects who wanted to ‘shoot up a synagogue’
(New York Jewish Week) — A tip from a Jewish security organization helped lead to the arrest of two suspects Saturday in connection with online threats to attack a New York City synagogue.
The Community Security Initiative, a group created by UJA-Federation of New York and its affiliated Jewish Community Relations Council, discovered threatening tweets on Friday morning and brought the information to law enforcement, according to a UJA spokesperson.
In a news conference at City Hall on Monday, UJA CEO Eric Goldstein said that after they shared the lead with the New York Police Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, law enforcement “immediately sprung into action.”
New York City Mayor Eric Adams said during the news conference that Metropolitan Transit Authority police officers arrested the suspects — Christopher Brown, 21, of Aquebogue on eastern Long Island and Michael Mahrer, 22, of Manhattan — at Penn Station, adding that they had “an alleged plan to murder members of the Jewish community in our city.”
“This was not an idle threat,” Adams said. “This was a real threat.”
Join me, @NYPDPC Sewell and other law enforcement leaders at City Hall to discuss the efforts that stopped a potential attack on the Jewish community in New York City this past weekend. https://t.co/WyVz2qe44Q
— Mayor Eric Adams (@NYCMayor) November 21, 2022
Adams added: “Hate is on the rise in America. This hate cannot be allowed to take hold and build and gain further ground. We must reject the hate and the division that drives it.”
On Sunday, Gov. Kathy Hochul, responding to the arrest and Saturday night’s deadly shooting at an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado, said state police would increase surveillance and protection efforts at synagogues and other vulnerable sites.
Steve Weill of Flatbush Shomrim, a Jewish community watch organization in Brooklyn, said at the press conference that he received a call on Friday night from NYPD Inspector Ritchie Taylor, an Orthodox Jew, who advised him that there was “a credible threat to the community.”
“We put a plan in place where hundreds of trained volunteers would reach all the synagogues and all the houses of worship in the areas and warn them,” Weill said.
The suspects were caught before that plan was implemented. Weill added that the Jewish community has “an unprecedented relationship” with Adams.
“The information that flows is incredible, that we can get such sensitive information and that they can have the trust in us to relay that to the community in a calm and professional manner,” Weill said.
The Daily Beast reported that the NYPD intelligence division had become aware of Brown’s tweets talking about “shooting up a synagogue and dying.” MTA police, state police, the NYPD and the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force worked together on the investigation, according to Hochul’s office.
According to the Daily Beast, the hunt for Brown led police to an apartment on West 94th St. in Manhattan, where his acquaintance Mahrer was said to live with his parents. Neither Brown nor Mahrer were at the apartment, but detectives found a backpack with a Glock semi-automatic pistol and ammunition . In an intelligence alert, police said Brown had “a history of mental illness.”
What police described as a white supremacist Twitter group operated by Brown was taken down. After being caught, Brown was held on a weapons charge, and Mahrer was charged with illegal weapons possession. Each pleaded not guilty to state charges and are scheduled to appear in court on Nov. 23.
The New York Post reported that Mahrer is Jewish and the grandson of a Holocaust survivor.
UJA-Federation of New York and the JCRC of New York created the Community Security Initiative after the deadly attack on the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018. CSI helps provide protection and safety training to Jews and Jewish institutions in New York City, Westchester and Long Island.
The arrests come just weeks after the FBI warned synagogues in New Jersey about a “credible threat” made to them; the NYPD heightened security at city synagogues as a precaution. The FBI later announced that a 19-year-old man who said he had sworn allegiance to ISIS had been arrested for making the threat.
The arrests also come a time of heightened anxiety about antisemitism in New York City and beyond. The NYPD has recorded an increase in the number of reported antisemitic incidents.
Meanwhile, celebrities Kanye West and Kyrie Irving have ignited concerns about antisemitism with their comments and tweets, and turmoil at Twitter has fueled a rise in hate posts, including about Jews, according to watchdogs who monitor the social media platform.
—
The post A Jewish group’s tip led to arrest of suspects who wanted to ‘shoot up a synagogue’ appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
The gift Tom Stoppard gave to me — and to all who adore him
In 2022, during a reporting trip to London, I had tea with a source who confessed to me that her mother’s central interest was the work of Tom Stoppard. It was more than an interest, really: “He was the main thing in her life,” she said.
There are artists you admire, and then there are artists you flat-out adore. Particularly cerebral types, like Stoppard, risk falling into the first category: They may generate great thoughts, but those great thoughts have a great chance of leaving you cold. That wasn’t the case for Stoppard, who died Saturday at 88, and was a thinker worth adoring. His best work achieved a rare balance: Audiences left his most affecting plays with both a fresh perspective on the world, and a feeling of great warmth toward it.
I felt that myself, after seeing a much-heralded revival of Stoppard’s Travesties on Broadway in 2018. It’s quite a highbrow play, about the brief intersection, in Switzerland during World War I, of the lives and work of James Joyce, Vladimir Lenin and Tristan Tzara, founder of Dadaism. It made me laugh until I cried. And the gloss Stoppard bestowed on this obscure episode of history followed me out of the theater, giving a brief sheen to everything and everyone I saw. I felt as though I floated back to Brooklyn, and as if the Q train might be full of personalities I’d never guess were important until years afterward.
Much of Stoppard’s work revolved around the question of what it really means to live an important life — one that is not just full, but has some kind of identifiable impact on others. The main character of Travesties isn’t Joyce, Lenin or Tzara; he’s an endearingly self-satisfied British diplomat, Henry Carr, who briefly found himself in the same circles as those luminaries. As the play opens, decades later, he’s trying to conjure up a memoir about his time in the presence of the greats, with the implication that he deserves to be considered among their ranks.
In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, the play that made Stoppard into a star at age 29, the two title characters grapple with their inability to in any way change the course of a narrative — that of Hamlet — that they know will lead to their deaths. In Shakespeare in Love, the film that won Stoppard an Oscar in 1998, he and his coauthor Marc Norman imagined the king of English playwrights as a young man full of talent but still struggling toward greatness, in need of an overwhelming emotional shock to propel him into complete ownership of his gifts.
There are the 19th-century Russian revolutionaries of the ambitious trilogy The Coast of Utopia; the intellectuals seeking to redefine the world and its history in Arcadia; the striving academics of The Hard Problem; the newly emancipated Viennese Jews of Leopoldstadt, the play Stoppard wrote that most profoundly invoked his heritage. Over and over, variations of the same question emerge. What does it mean to live completely and well, as an individual and a member of society?
“If there is any meaning in any of it” — “it” being the brutal course of history, its neverending cycles of destruction — “it is in what survives as art, yes even in the celebration of tyrants, yes even in the celebration of nonentities,” Joyce declares in Travesties. Later, Carr echoes him — a surprise, as the two hold very little respect for one another. When told that the only relevant function of art is “social criticism,” he protests.
“A great deal of what we call art,” he says, “has no such function, and yet in some way it gratifies a hunger that is common to princes and peasants.”
Not everyone wants to be an artist, and, as Carr reflects at the end of Travesties, it’s a sure thing that not everyone can be. But in the wake of Stoppard’s death, I’ve found myself thinking about the mother of my one-time source, so enraptured by what Stoppard created that her own child saw his work as the most profound passion of her life.
It’s easy to say that kind of effect made Stoppard’s life important. But the quieter story, I think, is that it made that devoted fan’s life important, too. Because she loved Stoppard, she saw herself as more firmly secured in her own existence; she saw herself as having a purpose and place.
To help someone experience their own significance — to gratify the common hunger that afflicts us all — is a great gift. And Stoppard gave it to many, including to me.
The post The gift Tom Stoppard gave to me — and to all who adore him appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Iran to Boycott World Cup Draw Over Visa Restrictions
Soccer Football – World Cup Playoff Tournament and European Playoff draws – FIFA Headquarters, Zurich, Switzerland- November 20, 2025 The original FIFA World Cup trophy is kept on display during the draws. Photo: REUTERS/Denis Balibouse
Iran intends to boycott next week’s World Cup draw due to the limited number of visas allocated to the country’s football federation.
According to the Tehran Times, the United States issued visas to only four members of Iran‘s delegation, with requests for three additional visas denied, including one for Iranian Football Federation (FFIRI) President Mehdi Taj.
“We have informed FIFA that the decisions taken are unrelated to sport and that the members of the Iranian delegation will not participate in the World Cup draw,” FFIRI spokesman Mehdi Alavi said on Friday, per the report.
Alavi said the federation has been in contact with FIFA in an effort to resolve the situation.
The World Cup draw will take place on Dec. 5 at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.
The expanded 48-team World Cup is being hosted by the United States, Canada and Mexico from June 11 to July 19, 2026. Matches will be played at 16 venues, including three in Mexico and two in Canada.
The draw will sort the teams into 12 groups of four. The top two teams from each group and the eight best third-place teams will advance to the knockout stage.
Iran has secured a spot in its fourth consecutive World Cup and seventh appearance overall.
Uncategorized
Dublin to Rename Chaim Herzog Park in a Move Slammed as Attempt to Erase Jewish History
Anti-Israel demonstrators stand outside the Israeli embassy after Ireland has announced it will recognize a Palestinian state, in Dublin, Ireland, May 22, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Molly Darlington
i24 News – Citing the Gaza war, Dublin city council voted to rename a park honoring Israel’s sixth president, the Irish-born Chaim Herzog, in further manifestation of anti-Israel sentiment in the country.
While a new name is yet to be chosen, reports cite efforts by pro-Palestinian activists to change it to the “Free Palestine Park.”
Former Irish justice minister Alan Shatter harshly criticized the vote, charging that “Dublin City Council has now gone full on Nazi & a committee of the Council has determined it should erase Jewish/Irish history. Herzog Park in Rathgar is named after Chaim Herzog, Israel’s 6th President, brought up in Dublin by his father, Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog, a friend of Eamon De Valera, who was Chief Rabbi of Ireland & Israel’s first Chief Rabbi… Some councillors want the Park renamed ‘Free Palestine Park.”
The Jewish Representative Council of Ireland issued a statement regarding the renaming of Herzog Park.
“It sends a hurtful and isolating message to a small minority community that has contributed to Ireland for centuries. We call on Dublin City Councillors to reject this motion. The removal of the Herzog name from this park would be widely understood as an attempt to erase our Irish Jewish history.”
A virtuoso diplomat and an intellectual giant, Herzog had served in a variety of roles throughout his storied career, including a memorable stint as the ambassador to the United Nations, where in 1975 he delivered a speech condemning the Soviet-engineered resolution to brand Zionism as a form of racism. The address is now regarded as a classic, along with the oration from the same session by the US Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar slammed the decision, saying that Ireland’s “antisemitic and anti-Israel obsession is sickening.”