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How this Brooklyn neighborhood became the ‘Klezmer Shtetl’
(New York Jewish Week) — Some of the greatest talents in Jewish music have strolled Midwood’s lettered avenues, including the klezmer musician Pete Sokolow and the Hasidic composer Ben Zion Shenker. Both have left us — Sokolow in 2022, Shenker in 2016 — but the Modzitzer synagogue on Avenue L, where Shenker once lead prayers, is a spiritual home for klezmer virtuoso and Midwood denizen Andy Statman, 73. He’s davened (prayed) there for more than 30 years.
Now, a younger group of klezmer musicians joins Statman in making the quiet, south-central Brooklyn neighborhood their home, due to the (relatively) affordable rents, low density and greenery, as well as its proximity to Jewish communal life spread across the borough.
“We needed more room than Park Slope could provide on our budget,” Pete Rushefsky, who has played a hammered dulcimer known as the tsimbl in the city’s klezmer scene for more than 30 years, told the New York Jewish Week. “It’s been a great neighborhood to raise a family.” That’s especially true for a culturally active family: Rushefsky’s wife, Madeline Solomon, sings, plays accordion and runs the Brooklyn Workers Circle School in Park Slope; their 12-year-old daughter, Mathilda, plays in a children’s fiddle band in the neighborhood.
Midwood looms so large over the present-day Jewish music scene that there’s even a klezmer rock band named for it: Midwood, the band, was founded in 2015 by the fiddler Jake Shulman-Ment. The 39-year-old veteran klezmer violinist lives in the same apartment building on Ocean Avenue as Jeremiah Lockwood, a blues performer and a scholar of cantorial music.
“I call it the ‘Klezmer Shtetl,’” said Midwood’s vocalist, Eleonore Weill, who is also a multi-instrumentalist. (Weill used to reside in Midwood but now lives in next-door Ditmas Park, which is also home to Sarah Gordon, lead singer of the rock band Yiddish Princess. Nearby Kensington counts among its klezmer-making residents D. Zisl Slepovitch and the klezmer couple Ilya Shneyveys and Sarah Myerson.)
Another Midwood musician is Michael Winograd, 40, who many consider to be the best klezmer clarinetist of his generation. As a teenager, he went to Statman’s home for lessons; last summer he moved to the neighborhood.
Midwood musicians Jeremiah Lockwood, left, and Pete Rushefsky. (Courtesy)
Elsewhere in Midwood resides guitarist Yoshie Fruchter, founder of Pitom, which the Tzadik record label called “a shredding Jewish instrumental band.” Fruchter has performed with Jon Madof’s Zion80, which plays Shlomo Carlebach tunes in an Afrobeat style, and Mazal Tov Cocktail Party, the latest klezmer/dance music project led by David Krakauer and Kathleen Tagg.
“I didn’t choose Midwood, particularly,” Shulman-Ment told New York Jewish Week. “It sort of fell into my life.” The fiddler decided to rent his Midwood one-bedroom in the summer of 2021 while he was on tour in the Pacific Northwest. After seeing the place online and sending a couple of friends to check it out in person, Shulman-Ment signed a lease while he was still on the road.
As it happens, Lockwood — who lives with his two sons, ages 14 and 16, on the floor below Shulman-Ment — also rented his apartment sight unseen that same summer.
The two neighbors credit Ivona Hertz, co-owner of Ocean Empire Management, with helping them find a home. Her company manages a pair of buildings across from Prospect Park that are home to so many jazz musicians, they came to be known as “the jazz dorms.”
“When the tenants are happy they always recommend their friends,” Hertz said, describing how she came to rent Midwood apartments to so many musicians. “That’s how the ‘jazz dorms’ were created and that’s how the Midwood buildings are now getting more musicians. The apartments are larger, up to three bedrooms, including the square footage, and more affordable in Midwood.”
According to the available rentals on the real estate website StreetEasy, the median rent in Midwood is $2,566. (Hertz, the property manager known for helping musicians, says she typically charges between $1,500 and $1,750 a month for one-bedroom rentals.) The median sale price in the nabe for the first quarter of this year was $644,000, according to the real estate website PropertyShark — that’s substantially less than the Brooklyn borough-wide median of $755,000.
In addition to relatively low housing costs, Midwood is also known for being home to a very large — and mostly Orthodox — Jewish community. Traditionally Ashkenazi, the southern reaches of the neighborhood have also seen steady growth of its longtime Sephardic Jewish community. “Sephardic Jews dominate from [an area known as the] Avenue H cut to Avenue Z,” Sarina Roffe, CEO of the The Brooklyn Jewish Historical Initiative and president of the Sephardic Heritage Project, told the New York Jewish Week. “The Sephardic community in Brooklyn has been growing for more than 100 years.”
Most of these newer, klezmer residents identify as secular Jews, and not Orthodox. But many of them said they enjoy living among their Orthodox brethren. Clarinetist Winograd lives in part of Midwood that’s “very Jewish,” as he described it. “I kind of like being a secular Jew who gets to experience the benefit of a quiet Shabbes. I enjoy being a culturally-engaged Jew living in a Jewish neighborhood even if I’m not partaking in the more religious activities.”
Shulman-Ment — who identifies as a secular Jew who is committed to Jewish culture — spent a year living in Crown Heights, so he was familiar with the feeling of living in an Orthodox neighborhood and feeling like a bit of an outsider. He said he’s noticed, though, that if he’s in his “gig costume” — a suit and fedora — some of his Orthodox co-religionists offer a friendly greeting.
Lockwood described his (and Shulman-Ment’s) section of Midwood, along Ocean Avenue, as “rough-hewn and unlovely. It is a hard-working and threadbare place.” And yet, “I like it here fine,” he told the New York Jewish Week, adding: “I just don’t want to encourage out-of-towners to move in.”
Fruchter — who moved to Midwood last December with his wife, Jewish cookbook author Leah Koenig, and their two kids, aged 4 and 9 — said his area of Midwood has a lot of Pakistani residents, but on Saturday his family can often hear zemiros, hymns sung at the Sabbath table, coming from the homes of Orthodox neighbors down the block. “I really like how you see people from so many different places, cultures, religions and backgrounds all sharing the same sidewalks,” Fruchter told the New York Jewish Week via email. “I love walking by businesses with signs in different languages and restaurants where I have no idea what to order… I love that it’s a ‘quiet’ neighborhood but with a lot of bustle in it.”
Klezmer virtuoso Andy Statman, left, has lived in the neighborhood more than 30 years, while guitarist Yoshie Fruchter, right, is a more recent resident. (Courtesy)
The family is involved in the Flatbush Jewish Center, a Conservative egalitarian synagogue in the neighboring Kensington section of Brooklyn where Fruchter has served as cantor on the High Holy Days and organized a concert series.
Fruchter is also a member of Shulman-Ment’s band Midwood — whose recording of their live performance at the “Klezmer On Ice” festival in Minneapolis last winter will be released in the coming months. Midwood the band’s next gig is at the National Yiddish Book Center’s annual Yidstock festival in Amherst, Massachusetts on July 16.
Shulman-Ment will also be performing with the actor and musician Daniel Kahn on June 15 at the East Village world music venue Drom. The performance is timed to the release of the duo’s first album, “The Building & Other Songs,” which features Yiddish versions of songs by Leonard Cohen, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Waits and Woody Guthrie.
The other Midwood klezmer musicians with gigs to look forward to are Rushefsky — who is also the executive director of the Center for Traditional Music and Dance — and Statman, who will both be playing with the violinist Itzhak Perlman in the coming months.
In addition, Statman plays in two trios: The Andy Statman Trio, which has performed at the Greenwich Village Synagogue in Manhattan regularly for 20 years, and another with the Eddy Brothers, two young West Virginia bluegrass musicians. More recently, Statman started playing with a traditional bluegrass quartet that’s comprised of players he’s known since he was a teenager. That band is now known as Andy’s Ramble, not to be confused with the 1994 Statman album of the same name.
Statman grew up in Queens and was in his mid-20s when he first moved to Brooklyn in 1976. After a series of apartments, he and his wife Basha moved to Avenue L in Midwood in 1987, where they raised their four children. “Our kids needed to be here. We needed to be here,” Statman said. “There is sky and trees and grass here. There are birds chirping all over. The neighborhood was incredibly vibrant.”
When he first arrived, Statman took a break from his music career for a year to study Jewish holy texts full time. In the 35 years since, he’s seen real estate values soar to a level he calls “ridiculous.” Statman said that since the early 2000s, he’s watched kids who grew up on his block move to Lakewood, New Jersey or Monsey in Rockland County — both home to sizable Orthodox Jewish communities — because they couldn’t afford to buy homes in Midwood. Now their parents are leaving, he added, because they want to be near their grandchildren.
It’s a fate the clarinetist is personally familiar with: None of his four children, now grown, live in the area. With two daughters and their grandchildren living near Lakewood, the Statmans are considering relocating there themselves.
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The post How this Brooklyn neighborhood became the ‘Klezmer Shtetl’ appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Two plays stage three years of infighting over Israel
The last three years of Jewish life can be read as a singular drama with no last act.
The Hamas attack on Oct. 7, 2023 proved to be just the first bloodletting in a renewed cycle of violence and recrimination. Israel responded with its destructive campaign in Gaza. Far from the theater of war, American Jews reckoned with renewed fears of antisemitism and fractures within their own communities and families.
Before that October had even ended, about two weeks into a discourse that’s still nowhere near to disappearing, Michel Hausmann, the artistic director of Miami New Drama, reached out to playwright Jonathan Spector to create a play reacting to the moment.
The writer’s response: a categorical no.
“I was like, ‘That’s the worst idea I’ve ever heard. I wouldn’t touch that with a 10-foot pole, it’s too scary and hard and complicated,’” Spector, a Tony winner for his play Eureka Day, recalled, “but you know, he was very persistent.”
“I think I wore him down,” Hausmann, a Venezuelan-born Jew, told me.
The result of this exploration is Birthright, a domestic epic that touches on international news and centuries of Jewish thought. The play, now at MCC Theatre after a 2025 debut at Miami New Drama, follows six friends, most of whom met on a Birthright trip in 2006. It opens in the pre-smartphone age and ends in the social media-saturated aftermath of Oct. 7. Overall, it covers 18 years, an intentionally Jewish number.
“I feel like so many of the ways that these kinds of arguments play out is people leap very quickly from a thing that happened yesterday to a thing that happened 80 years ago to a thing that happened 2000 years ago,” Spector said. “It’s too narrow a lens if we’re only looking at this moment.”
Spector landed on the organizing idea of a Birthright trip after conducting interviews with a diverse group of American Jews, most of whom mentioned the free journey to Israel. (Spector, raised Conservative in the DC suburbs, like his characters, didn’t participate in Birthright; he hasn’t been to Israel since he was 15.)
Hausmann, whose theater only produces world premieres and designs its season to cater to the local Cuban, Venezuelan and Jewish communities, commissioned Spector because as early as Oct. 8, he imagined the response from the cultural field would be missing complexity or morphing into activism.
In truth, theaters have been slow to respond. Seasons have featured shows about antisemitism and Israel, but for the most part, they’d been in development before these issues were on everyone’s minds and social feeds.
Joshua Harmon’s A Prayer for the French Republic moved from its 2022 off-Broadway run to a Dec. 2023 Broadway opening largely unchanged. But amid the mounting headlines, the historical irony of the central family’s ultimate choice to relocate to Israel for safety was devastating in its new theater.
Itamar Moses’ The Ally, which premiered at the Public in Feb. 2024, looked prescient in its dissection of campus activism surrounding Israel. It concerned a Berkeley professor caught between his liberal values and his Israeli parentage. Moses’ show was scheduled for the season well before Oct. 7, but debuted just after. The playwright chose not to touch the Hamas attack, but conclude right on the cusp of it.
By the time Giant, about Roald Dahl’s antisemitism, transferred from the West End to Broadway earlier this year, many online seemed to have no problem with Dahl’s blithe Holocaust inversion, accusing the play of vilifying someone who was merely an advocate for the persecuted neighbors of the Jewish state.
Birthright and S. Asher Gelman’s The Zionists: A Family Storm, which opened at Miami New Drama in April and is now playing at Barrington Stages in the Berkshires, are the first major American plays directly addressing a post-Oct. 7 Jewish world.
Gathering the storm
Gelman told me his play emerged out of what he saw as betrayal from his progressive artistic community, which immediately sought to “contextualize” Hamas’ barbarity.
“I watched complex histories become flattened and simplified for ostensibly propaganda,” said Gelman, whose previous plays include the gay polyamory play Afterglow. He was floored by the views of some people in his circle who labeled him, as an American-born Israel citizen who lived in Tel Aviv from 2006 to 2016, a “white colonizer.”
He started taking notes, and about a year after Hamas’ invasion of Israel, began work on his play, about a wealthy and well-connected Jewish family on vacation in the Turks and Caicos. (Gelman’s parents are Jewish philanthropists, like the matriarch and patriarch in the play; one of his sisters, like the play’s youngest son, has funded pro-Palestinian groups.)
In setting up the drama, a kind of staged debate between the liberal Zionist family and the anti-Zionist wicked son and his husband, Gelman had to think of a way to keep the warring factions in the room to have the conversation.
His solution was a violent metaphor: a hurricane raging outside their deluxe bungalow.
“I think that the beauty of The Zionists is that you have to sit down through it, you have to hear a point of view, wherever you stand,” said Hausmann. Perhaps because of the play’s title, he said, members of Jewish Voice for Peace picketed the production in Miami. In one performance, an audience member shouted back as one character made his case for anti-Zionism.
“All extremes are upset at us, and so I think that we’re doing something right,” Hausmann said.
The yelling matches in the play tip into the tedious at times, and the grievance-laden backstory given to the anti-Zionist Aaron — he’s a recovering drug addict whose IDF donor brother outed him as gay when they were kids — seems to support a familiar claim made against Jewish critics of Israel: They are acting out against their upbringing rather than out of a real conviction.
While the show pays lip service to the Jewish value of questioning, it often seems disinterested in the anti-Zionist perspective, privileging the gradient spectrum of liberal Zionism in a queer, multiracial modern family with at least one convert and two descendants of refugees.
Gelman, 42, says he thinks anti-Zionist Jews of a younger generation (the Aaron character is 34) may arrive at their beliefs because they don’t remember a pre-Netanyahu Israel or Rabin and Arafat shaking hands on the White House lawn.
They’ve only “known one type of Israel,” he said.
The art of argument
Spector wrestled with the arguments he wanted his characters to make. The show could have easily been a back and forth about the Peel Commission or suicide bombings during the Second Intifada, but the more ideas he included, the more the play flatlined.
“It’s, like a three hour 10 minute running time and only 15 minutes of it is arguments,” Spector said, “but I probably wrote and have cut two hours worth of arguments.”
He took care to make sure the points of view were rooted in character and their evolution: The most outspoken anti-Zionist character, Izzy (Molly Bernard), evolves from working for J Street to leaving the group chat when her friends send a link to The New York Times walking back its reporting on the 2023 Al-Ahli hospital explosion, which rushed prematurely to blame Israel for the strike. By that point, we can glean how everything from Izzy’s fertility to her disillusionment with her work has shaped her worldview.
Spector came to realize that the question he was examining wasn’t a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian crisis or in winning a debate (he thinks social media has gamified conversation), but a change within American Judaism.
In the second half of the 20th Century, he said, Jewish institutions made an effort to pitch a big, tolerant tent to embrace all levels of observance. “As the main dividing line within American Jewish life has shifted from your religious practice to your beliefs about Israel, there’s been a similar kind of shift away from tolerance from people on both sides of that divide,” he said.
He’s less interested in passing judgment on this development than trying to make sense of it. It’s a view expressed by the character of Izzy in his play.
“I can go up on the bimah at my parents’ shul and I can say I am married to a woman, I can say I don’t keep kosher, I can say I don’t believe in God,” she said, noting how she’d not just be accepted but welcome. “The one thing that would get me kicked off the bimah, kicked out of the shul, kicked out of my family is if I say I am an anti-Zionist.”
Spector said so far a minority of audience members have been uncomfortable with his show. (The evening I saw it, there were young people with tattoos and men in kippot; by contrast, the crowd at The Zionists, typical of my theatergoing there, looked to be almost exclusively of retirement age.) His own views have naturally evolved with the play – he’s been working on it for years, and the facts on the ground have changed.
“It’s a little bit difficult for me to separate the work on the play and the evolution of my own feelings and beliefs,” he said. “If I could sum those up in a sound bite, I wouldn’t need to write a three-and-a-half hour play.”
Hope for healing?
Birthright was the first entry in Miami New Drama’s Jewish Play Commission. Hausmann said some donors wished the piece was more “feel-good,” but said he thinks it is, ultimately, healing.
Spector doesn’t use that word.
”Midway through writing it, I was definitely like, ‘Oh my God. How am I going to find an ending to this that is not just like unrelentingly bleak and depressing,’ because that was certainly how I felt in the moment about where things were.” We black out on a scene of people coming together in a shared grief.
The Zionists ends at a moment of uncertainty amid a wrathful, Act of God weather event. For Gelman, the ambiguity and anger are the point, and point to a way forward.
“Discomfort, disagreement, it’s a feature of a great relationship, not a bug,” Gelman said. “With the privilege and luxury of actual physical safety comes the responsibility to be brave and the responsibility to be uncomfortable. Discomfort is the price we pay for community.”
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Colorado congressional race upset hinged on Israel
A democratic socialist who put condemnation of Israel front and center in her campaign defeated a long-serving member of Congress in Colorado’s congressional primary Tuesday, adding to recent upsets that are rocking the Democratic party and Jewish politics.
Melat Kiros beat U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette, a 15-term incumbent first elected in 1996, just one week after two New York members of the Democratic Socialists of America movement defeated sitting congressmen targeted as supporters of military aid to Israel.
“Denver voters of all ages, of all races, of all religions sent a clear message: We will not wait!” Kiros declared in her victory speech, which took aim at U.S. aid for Israel. “We will not wait to reject corporate PACs like AIPAC. No, we will not wait to end the genocide in Palestine.”
She will face Republican Christy Peterson in the general election but is favored to win the heavily Democratic district.
Meanwhile, Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser, the son and grandson of Holocaust survivors, won the Democratic nomination to replace the term-limited Gov. Jared Polis, who also is Jewish. David Seligman, a progressive Jewish candidate for the open attorney general seat, lost in a four-way contest to Secretary of State Jena Griswold, who gained notoriety for removing Donald Trump from Colorado’s 2024 ballot.
Kiros, who was born in 1997, the year DeGette took office, used Israel as a wedge throughout the campaign — calling for an arms embargo against Israel, including a suspension of funding for defensive weapons including the Iron Dome.
She also vows to abolish the federal Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agency and pass Medicare for all.
Hasan Piker, the progressive streamer who has been accused of trafficking in antisemitism, attended Kiros’ victory party in Denver Tuesday. She also picked up endorsements from U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders and a slew of leftist groups. Some Jewish Coloradans supported her, saying that her harsh criticism of Israel is necessary and warranted.
In her victory speech on Tuesday, Kiros reminded supporters that she did not flinch when her former law firm, Sidley Austin, threatened to fire her if she didn’t take down a post on Medium addressed to law firms nationally supporting anti-Israel student protesters on college campuses — and was ultimately terminated.
Kiros’ victory on Tuesday comes on the heels of the defeat of two Democratic incumbents in New York targeted specifically for their support of aid to Israel. A former Gaza war encampment leader on Columbia University’s campus, Darializa Avila Chevalier, beat incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat, while former New York City Comptroller Brad Lander will replace Rep. Dan Goldman. Another candidate who campaigned on Israel, Claire Valdez, secured the nomination for another House seat being vacated by Rep. Nydia Velazquez in New York’s 7th district.
Like Kiros, both Valdez and Avila Chevalier are DSA members. Lander, who is Jewish, left DSA after Oct. 7, 2023, when DSA promoted a pro-Palestinian Times Square rally that Avila Chevalier attended.
Like Avila Chevalier, Kiros has come under scrutiny for her repudiation of Israel and its supporters.
In the final stretch of her campaign, Kiros gained national attention for declining to declare antisemitic the 2025 firebombing of a group holding a vigil in Boulder, saying in an interview: “I don’t know what was in the heart of the perpetrator. All I know is that he attacked innocent people because of what they might have believed,” adding that she could not say what they believed, either: “most of them were probably just there to ask that the people who were kidnapped on Oct. 7 be returned to their families.”
The attacker, Mohammed Soliman, was heard saying “Free Palestine” as he threw molotov cocktails and used an improvised flamethrower to burn 13 people, including an 82-year-old woman who later died of her wounds.
As a candidate, Kiros has said in interviews that weapons that defend Israeli citizens against attacks from Iran and Hezbollah “give Israel the cover” to continue policies of genocide and ethnic cleansing. (Genocide scholars have debated whether the war in Gaza rises to the level of genocide.)
And asked whether Israel “had it coming” on Oct. 7, Kiros told a local news channel “no, not at all — it’s about understanding the conditions in which violence and war happens.” She said Israel had resisted change despite decades of international frustration with its policies; her job as a member of Congress, she said, was to change those conditions.
In the gubernatorial contest, Weiser’s victory over U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet made him the likely next governor of the state. Colorado has not had a Republican governor since 2007.
Bennet’s mother, like Weiser’s, survived the Holocaust. She was smuggled out of the Warsaw Ghetto as a child before her family immigrated to New York. But Bennet was raised Christian and does not identify as Jewish.
Estare Weiser was born in Buchenwald the day before the camp was liberated. Now 81, she was photographed celebrating with Weiser, 58, at his victory party Tuesday.
Weiser’s platform focuses on expanding the state’s universal preschool program, defending LGBTQ+ and women’s rights and countering Republican gerrymandering efforts in other states. He entered the race as an underdog, but successfully attacked Bennet for backing several Trump cabinet nominees.
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Survey: Jews in smaller communities feel less heard when raising concerns about antisemitism
(JTA) — Jews living in smaller communities are less likely than those in large communities to feel their concerns about antisemitism are taken seriously by law enforcement and would-be allies, a new survey from the Jewish Federations of North America has found.
Jews in smaller communities were “lacking a sense of allyship in the communities around them,” said Mimi Kravetz, the chief impact and growth officer for JFNA.
“Jews in small communities tell us that they feel deeply concerned that they’re looking for support, that their leadership is looking for network and resources, because it can feel like they’re on their own,” Kravetz told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
The JFNA survey, which was compiled from its March 2025 study of Jewish Life in North America, found that 22% of Jews live in small communities. Defined as Jewish communities with fewer than 5,000 Jews living within five miles of their zip code, small Jewish communities are also more likely to be found in the South or in rural or suburban areas.
Although the survey found no statistically significant difference in the antisemitism experienced by Jews in smaller and larger communities, it found that Jews in small communities are more likely to feel that antisemitism is invalidated or dismissed.
Among respondents, 58% of Jews in small communities reported feeling more likely to be invalidated, compared with 48% of Jews overall.
Jews in small communities were also less likely to express confidence in local law enforcement’s responses to antisemitism. Just 39% of Jews in small communities say local law enforcement takes antisemitism seriously, compared with 47% of Jews in larger communities.
Leaders of small Jewish communities also feel less physically safe in Jewish spaces than their big city counterparts: 60% of those small-community leaders said they feel safe, compared to 86% of community leaders overall.
While the survey found that 50% of Jews in smaller communities report being unengaged in Jewish life, compared to 36% of Jewish respondents overall, they were just as likely to say they wanted greater connection to Jewish life.
The survey suggested that geographic constraints and limited availability of Jewish life likely caused the disparity in engagement, even as Jews sought out Jewish connections in the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel.
Kravetz said Jews in small communities were just as likely as Jews in big communities to crave those connections.
“What’s needed in small Jewish communities is more leadership infrastructure and support for Jewish life,” Kravetz said.
The survey was conducted before the January arson attack on Beth Israel Congregation, the only synagogue in Jackson, Mississippi, which drew renewed attention to the security challenges facing smaller Jewish communities.
Michele Schipper, the CEO of the Goldring/Woldenberg Institute of Southern Jewish Life, a nonprofit that supports Jewish communities across the South and was housed inside Beth Israel Congregation prior to the arson attack, said security remains a challenge for some smaller congregations.
“For some of those smaller communities, they may not be able to have personnel on site every time they’re open,” Schipper said. “It may be an older building. Not everyone is able to get one of the secure community grants,” she said, referring to federal and state government grants to nonprofits seen as vulnerable to attack.
Earlier this month leaders from Jewish communities across the South convened at the ISJL’s annual conference in Charlotte, North Carolina, where Schipper said they discussed strategies for keeping smaller communities safe.
“One of the things we really did share is how important it is not to isolate ourselves in these communities, but to continually build relationships with the local community, with local law enforcement, so that when, God forbid, something happens, you’re not starting to reach out or wait for somebody to contact you,” Schipper said.
Looking ahead, Schipper said her message to Jews in small communities was to “continue to build relationships in your own local community, and just continue to participate in the Jewish community and stay strong and positive.”
The study, which was conducted online by JFNA from March 5-25, 2025, surveyed 5,798 total U.S. adults, of which 1,877 identified as Jewish. The margin of error for Jewish adults was ± 2.26%, and samples were weighted to be representative of the U.S. population and Jewish community.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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