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FBI investigating after shooter fires blanks inside Russian Jewish center in San Francisco
(J. The Jewish News of Northern California via JTA) — A man fired blanks from a handgun at a Jewish center in San Francisco Wednesday, shocking a group gathered for a study session in a community space serving mainly Russian-speaking Jews.
But no one present called police, so it was not until word of the incident began circulating in the community that authorities became involved. Now, local police and the FBI are searching for the man, whom they believe may have been the same person who brandished a gun at a local theater earlier in the week.
The man entered the Schneerson Center around 7:20 p.m. in the middle of a session on the life of the Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson, according to Rabbi Bentzion Pil, who leads the community.
After the man entered, Pil said he first asked whether he wanted to join their session. It soon became clear that was not his intention.
Instead, the man pulled out a gun and said in accented Russian that he was from Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, and that he was going to start shooting, attendees said. Other outlets reported that he may have announced, “Say hello to Mossad for me.”
“I thought he was joking,” Pil told J. The Jewish News of Northern California on Thursday. “He looked like a Russian Jew.”
Located in a Richmond District neighborhood near what’s often called Little Russia, the Schneerson Center is a node of Jewish life for immigrants from the former Soviet Union in the Bay Area, where households from the former Soviet Union number between 15,000 and 20,000, according to Rabbi Shimon Margolin, who leads a local nonprofit serving Russian-speaking Jews.
A jarring video of the incident captured on a security camera shows what unfolded: A man wearing a baseball cap, jacket and sneakers enters the room and gestures animatedly with his arms while speaking to those seated around a table. After about 15 seconds, he reaches into his jacket pocket and reveals a handgun. He appears to struggle to cock the weapon, while an elderly man makes a phone call and starts walking toward him.
As the elderly man approaches, the suspect starts firing his weapon, and the elderly man crouches down. The man fires in a direction away from those seated around the table, then proceeds to fire around the room while some people clutch their ears and duck. In total the suspect fires between six and eight shots. Then he leaves.
“Everyone was stunned and shocked,” Pil said.
The video shows little movement from a dozen or so people around the table — many of whom are in their 60s or older, shul members said.
The Schneerson Center in San Francisco is a Lubavitch enterprise that serves mostly Russian-speaking Jews. (Google Maps)
Pil said the group was perplexed. “It was so unexpected from him,” he said.
One person in the group said he might have seen the suspect before. After the shooting started, Pil said he went into the kitchen to grab a knife, but by the time he got back the man was gone.
After the man left, those gathered deliberated about whether to call the police, Pil said.
“I still believe it was just a crazy guy,” he said. “He didn’t scream any antisemitic words or expressions.”
Ultimately, Pil said, they decided it wasn’t worth contacting the police because they were unhurt and they doubted the man would be kept in detention for long if he was caught.
Only the next day was law enforcement contacted after some of the younger community members heard about what had happened.
“I was shaken,” said Alon Chanukov, who viewed the incident on security footage. He said he reached the San Francisco Police Department Thursday morning and was told the matter would be referred to the investigations unit.
Chanukov said the video disturbed him greatly.
“There is a man, with a gun, who was in my shul. And I see elderly people cowering as he is firing his gun,” he said.
“This is a terrorist attack. The point of this was to cause terror,” Chanukov said. “Not to kill people. But to literally terrify Jews, as best as I can see.”
Statistics compiled by the California attorney general’s office show a rise in hate crimes targeting Jews over the last 10 years. Jews are the most frequent target of religiously motivated hate crimes in the state, numbers that accord with national figures.
Mattie Pil, the rabbi’s wife, lent another interpretation as to why the mostly senior Jews from the former Soviet Union did not contact police.
“They still feel like they’re in the Soviet Union,” she said. “There, when something happens, it’s always the fault of the Jews. If you called police, it would be your fault. So they didn’t want to make any waves.”
This story was originally reported in J. The Jewish News of Northern California, and is reprinted with permission.
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A Super Bowl Ad Against Antisemitism with No Consequence Misses the Mark
Robert Kraft. Photo: New England Patriots/Wikimedia Commons
I greatly respect Patriots owner Robert Kraft and his efforts to warn about the dangers of antisemitism. The Jewish community has largely failed in fighting this disease, for which there is no cure.
Some will also say that no ad will stop antisemitism, and argue that it’s a waste of money to run advertisements at all. But I strongly disagree.
There are a range of people in America, including some who have hatred in their hearts but have not yet acted on it, or some who don’t even know Jews personally. In a world where millions are listening to Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and laughing at Kanye West’s “Heil Hitler,” it would be useful to have some persuasive media strategy against antisemitism.
I’m not sure how many Americans watch Douglas Murray, Ben Shapiro, or follow Hillel Fuld online, but more than 100 million watch the Super Bowl annually.
It is a fantastic decision to spend money on an ad against antisemitism if it can get people’s attention, be emotionally impactful, show consequences for a perpetrator of hate, and make people think for a second.
Many tools must be used in the fight against antisemitism, and there is no reason why ads can’t be one of them. While they won’t likely change the mind of people planning to assault Jews, they might change the minds of others. I have a friend whose son was called a dirty Jew in school. The student likely called him that because he figured there would be no consequence.
This year’s ad — which follows ads in 2024 and 2025 — featured a Jewish boy who is pushed. We see a post-it calling him a “Dirty Jew.” An African-American student puts a blue square on it, and notes that Black people have experienced similar hatred.
The ad is a failure because it doesn’t grab your attention, shows no perpetrator, and more importantly — shows no consequences.
It is a slight improvement over last year’s ad with Tom Brady and Snoop Dogg, as that had zero authenticity. This ad has some authenticity, but by showing no perpetrator, it actually normalizes antisemitism — as if we should expect students to write “Dirty Jew” on the backpacks and lockers of students. We should have seen the student writing it, and seen some repercussions — be it a suspension, students looking at them as losers, or something of that sort.
There should be funds allocated to making meaningful ads about Jew-hatred both on regular TV and online. It is inexplicable that this is not being done, and there are so many Jewish celebrities that could be involved. I just wished Kraft’s ad had done a much better job.
The author is a writer based in New York.
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Beyond the Bunker and the Billboard: A New Approach to Fighting Antisemitism
Tens of thousands joined the National March Against Antisemitism in London, Nov. 26, 2023. Photo: Tayfun Salci/ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
Earlier this month, Bret Stephens delivered the “State of World Jewry” address. At the risk of oversimplifying his speech, Stephens’ message was a somber pivot: the millions of dollars spent fighting antisemitism are largely wasted. We cannot “cure” the world of this hatred. Instead, we should spend those resources strengthening Jewish identity — funding Jewish day schools, summer camps, and building a fortress of internal resilience.
On Sunday, Robert Kraft’s Foundation to Combat Antisemitism continued their diametrically opposite approach. During the Super Bowl, they ran an ad featuring a Black student showing allyship to a Jewish student who is being bullied. The message is optimistic: Education, awareness, and cross-cultural empathy can win the day.
One strategy is retreat and fortify; the other is reach out and persuade.
I believe both are destined to fail.
Stephens is right that we cannot logic our way out of hate, but his solution surrenders the public square. Kraft is noble in his pursuit of allyship, but his solution relies on empathy that simply may not exist in large enough quantities.
There is a third path. It does not rely on Jewish introspection, nor does it beg for non-Jewish affection. It relies on universal enforcement.
The Failure of “Particularism”
If you poll Americans on how they feel about “antisemitism” (or its modern fraternal twin, “anti-Zionism,” which is a label that now mostly serves as a cover for Jew-hatred), the results are messy. Resistance to these specific bigotries is not universal; it is partisan, generational, and fraught with “context.”
However, if you poll Americans on the universal moral taboos — overt bigotry, dehumanization, and the endorsement of violence — the consensus is overwhelming. Even in our divided era, I am certain that more than 90% of the country agrees that persecuting a racial or religious group or celebrating violence is socially unacceptable.
This is the strategic flaw in both the Stephens and Kraft approaches: They treat antisemitism as a unique problem requiring a unique solution.
But we don’t need a “Jewish” solution. We need a universal solution, and fortunately one already exists.
The most effective way to protect the Jewish community is to stop asking society to protect Jews specifically, and start demanding society protect civilization generally and all of its people equally.
We must broaden the fight. We recruit the entire country not to defend Jews against Jew-hatred, but to defend the core American value that all overt hatred is an inadmissible taboo.
When we make the standard universal, we strip away the “exceptions.” If society agrees that “dehumanization is a firing offense,” then a person dehumanizing a Zionist must be fired the same as if they dehumanized Black or gay Americans — not because the employer loves Zionists or Black or LGBT people, but because the employer fears tolerating and normalizing these taboos of hate regardless of the group being targeted.
To do this, we must re-acquaint the mainstream with the concept of moral taboos.
As Jonathan Haidt explored in The Righteous Mind, true moral taboos are not intellectual; they are visceral. We don’t debate whether incest is wrong; we recoil from it. We need to restore that same visceral recoil to bigotry and the endorsement of violence, which largely exists, but then we must re-familiarize society with the mechanism for enforcing taboos: social consequences.
Stephens gives up on the outer world. Kraft tries to persuade it with carrots. The Third Path uses the stick of social ostracism. Social consequences are society’s immune response. When the immune system is working, a “Rejoicer” who cheers for violence is expelled from the body politic — not by law, but by consensus.
The Binary Choice
While restoring these taboos sounds like a generational challenge, the alternative makes the choice obvious.
We are either going to restore these universal guardrails — punishing those who egregiously violate them, just as we did to the KKK — or we will allow hate to be normalized until it spills over into political violence that no amount of Jewish Day Schools or Super Bowl ads can stop.
We don’t need to beg the world for its affection, nor should we retreat into a fortress. We need to remind the world that the taboos which protect us are the same ones that hold civilization together. If we lead the fight to restore those universal standards, we won’t just be securing a future for the Jews — we’ll be saving the country from itself.
Erez Levin is an advertising technologist trying to effect big pro-social changes in that industry and the world at large, currently focused on restoring society’s essential moral taboos against overt hatred. He writes on this topic at elevin11.substack.com.
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How the Palestinian Authority Hides ‘Pay-for-Slay’
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas visiting the West Bank city of Jenin. Photo: Reuters/Mohamad Torokman
On Feb. 10, 2025, under intense pressure from Western countries, Palestinian Authority (PA) leader Mahmoud Abbas announced the cancellation of the PA Commission of Prisoners’ terror rewards program known as “Pay-for-Slay,” saying that the payments to terrorist prisoners and so-called Martyrs’ families would be moved to the Palestinian National Economic Empowerment Institution (PNEEI) and be based on social welfare criteria.
While many Western leaders have praised the PA for promising to stop paying terrorists in prison, the PA has another huge terror rewards program for released terrorist prisoners with more than 10,000 hidden Pay-for-Slay recipients receiving more than $230 million a year. And the PA has no intention of disclosing it or stopping it.
The PA enlarged this already existing program in 2021, when it took nearly 7,500 released prisoners who were receiving payments and moved them from the PA Commission of Prisoners into other frameworks. In addition, there are more than 13,500 families of Martyrs and injured living outside the PA areas who are receiving over $86 million a year.
The PA Prisoners and Released Prisoners Law requires the PA to reward terrorists who were imprisoned for more than five years with lifetime salaries. After Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) exposed in 2020 that there were at least 7,500 released prisoners to whom the PA was paying monthly terror reward salaries, the PA was condemned by the donor countries.
As the PA explained: “Europe, the US, and Israel” did not accept that the PA paid released terrorists merely because “they killed.”
The PA acted quickly. In early 2021, Mahmoud Abbas issued a Presidential Order to “integrate” all the thousands of released terrorists receiving Pay-for-Slay salaries into government and PA Security Forces (PASF) jobs, and he changed PA pension laws to enable thousands of ineligible terrorists to receive PA pensions.
The PA set up a special committee to work continuously, “even on vacation days,” to hide these recipients. By the end of 2021, all 7,500 recipients of terror salaries were erased from the Commission of Prisoners lists and, although unqualified, were granted jobs and pensions to receive their hidden Pay-for-Slay without Western scrutiny.
These recipients are so well hidden that some Western donor countries, to avoid funding Pay-for-Slay, have been designating their support specifically to pay civil servants or PASF salaries and pensions — the very places that the PA has hidden its terrorists.
With this terror reward program below the West’s radar, the PA is not planning to stop these terror payouts to released terrorist prisoners. PMW estimates that with these two programs, at least 23,500 terrorists received hidden Pay-for-Slay payments in 2025, amounting to $315 million in hidden Pay-for-Slay.
Part 3 of our recent report includes transcribed conversations between recipients of Pay-for-Slay in the first months of 2026, confirming that the PA is expanding its Pay-for-Slay by at least 6,000 recipients. The PA is intentionally lying to the US, the EU, France, and other Western countries, while working continuously to find ways to secretly reward Palestinian terrorists.
The author is the Founder and Director of Palestinian Media Watch, where a version of this article first appeared.