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Synagogues size up security after Michigan attack amid intensifying risks
Jewish security professionals say the attack on Temple Israel in the Detroit suburbs Thursday highlights a need for Jewish institutions to prepare for more such “two-staged” assaults in which attackers use both a vehicle and weapons, as the threat of antisemitic violence grows following the Israel-U.S. launch of war on Iran.
“We crossed a threshold yesterday in terms of the way we think about Jewish security,” said Mitch Silber, who runs the Community Security Initiative in New York City. His organization is considering helping to pay for synagogues around the city to have at least two guards capable of stopping assailants who are carrying knives or guns.
Right now, some synagogues in the city only have a single unarmed guard intended to serve as a deterrent. “You need to have not one but multiple armed guards on the external part of the institution certainly for as long as the war continues,” Silber said. “An unarmed guard is insufficient given the nature of the threats we seem to be facing.”
But following years of massive investments in security infrastructure and a rising number of antisemitic incidents, many Jewish leaders say they were saddened but unsurprised by the attack on Temple Israel, in which an assailant armed with a rifle and smoke bombs drove his truck into the building before being shot and killed by a security guard, and already feel prepared to address such threats.
“The Jewish people are constantly attacked,” said Rabbi Natalie Shribman of Temple Kol Ami in West Bloomfield, Michigan, located just half a mile from Temple Israel. “So unfortunately, my fear remains at the same level of heightened.”
Shribman is from Pittsburgh, where a mass shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in 2018 killed 11 congregants. At Temple Kol Ami, the congregation already has a security guard who carries a concealed weapon.
Shribman said she would follow the West Bloomfield police department’s guidance if it recommends additional security — but so far, it hasn’t recommended any changes.
Years of investment
One reason that more synagogue leaders may not be scrambling is that many already feel prepared. “The Jewish community has been at an 11 out of 10 for many years now,” said Rusty Rosenthal, a former FBI agent who runs regional security for the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington.
Adam Zimmerman has spent the past decade teaching Hebrew school at Temple Beth Ami in Rockville, Maryland — a job description that as of late includes running security drills with police officers and keeping a constant eye on the door.
When he enters the building, he passes multiple armed guards.
“We get so used to it that sometimes we don’t even notice. And the fact that we’re so used to it speaks to the type of environment we’re living in,” Zimmerman said. “What the incident in Michigan exposed yesterday is that every time Jews gather anywhere for any reason, we are at risk of harm.”
“Jewish life in America is now accompanied by security presence.”
Rabbi Rick KellnerCongregation Beth Tikvah
The Jewish Federation of Detroit, which covers the region where both Temple Israel and Kol Ami are located, has one of the longest-running security programs in the Jewish community, spinning it off into an independent organization four years ago.
Temple Israel hired Danny Phillips, the guard who was injured in the attack, as its full-time security director in June and he oversaw a sophisticated operation that included a combination of in-house security team with metal detectors, guards for hire, police and even overhead drones during events like High Holiday services.
Nationwide, the Jewish community spends an estimated $765 million each year on security, according to the Jewish Federations of North America — representing an investment that surged in the aftermath of the Tree of Life shooting.
Rick Kellner, senior rabbi at Congregation Beth Tikvah in Worthington, Ohio, also said that was when his synagogue increased its security. The congregation pays police officers who are regularly stationed outside the synagogue.
“Jewish life in America is now accompanied by security presence,” Kellner said. “That is a reality that we are facing and living with every day.”
Iran war prompted new measures
Even before Thursday’s attack, Kellner said his congregation had taken extra precautions in recent weeks amid heightened security concerns related to the Iran war. Secure Community Network, which coordinates nationwide security for synagogues and other Jewish institutions, said during a briefing on Friday that the number of violent social media posts aimed at Jews nearly doubled in the week after the U.S. and Israel began bombing Iran and has continued to grow.
“We’ve seen a significant increase in calls for acts of violence targeted at Israel and the American Jewish community not only by Iran but also on Russian-linked forums, on al-Qaeda and Islamic State forums and white supremacist forums,” said Kerry Sleeper, chief of threat management at SCN, which sent a bulletin warning about these threats to its members on March 1.
Michael Masters, director of SCN, said that his main advice for Jewish institutions was to focus on maintaining the kind of active shooter training and “layered” physical security that has been encouraged for years — including bollards, window film and limiting public access — while increasing communication with local law enforcement.
Cost a consideration
But all these steps can come at a steep cost. Temple Israel advertises itself as the nation’s largest Reform synagogue, with more than 3,000 families, but smaller congregations and Jewish nonprofits can struggle to afford the $90,000 to $160,000 it can cost each year for an armed security guard or director.
Even properly installed bollards meant to stop vehicles can also cost thousands of dollars and require government approval to be installed on sidewalks outside of buildings.
A poll of Conservative synagogues last year found that most congregations assessed a separate fee to members for security costs, and some charged participants for security at life cycle events like bar and bat mitzvahs.
Millions of dollars in security costs are covered by the federal government in the form of grants from the Department of Homeland Security, but those dollars have been repeatedly tied up during the second Trump administration. They were initially frozen as an apparent cost-cutting measure, before being partly released last June after the shooting at the Capital Jewish Museum in D.C. and the fire attack in Boulder, Colorado.
The federal government subsequently added restrictions to the grants, including a requirement that synagogues receiving the funding eliminate diversity programs and cooperate with immigration enforcement — requirements some congregations have deemed intolerable — and they’ve again been frozen after Congress failed to fund DHS.
Gary Togrow, chair of the Jewish Federations of North America, said on Friday that the money should be released and the total pool increased to $1 billion. He and other leaders have also called for more flexibility so synagogues can use them to pay for more security in addition to camera systems and physical infrastructure improvements.
While much of the conversation about security in the aftermath of Temple Israel has suggested a certain fatalism that threats of antisemitic violence will persist, some leaders have focused on a simpler appeal: discouraging the attacks themselves.
Rabbi Josh Weinberg, a vice president of the Union for Reform Judaism, wrote an article Friday titled: “Stop Shooting at Synagogues,” referencing both the Temple Israel attack in addition to those in Canada and Norway.
He said that while the Temple Israel attacker’s motive remains unclear, his assault felt like yet another sign that anger at the Israeli government is being directed toward Jews.
“Attacking synagogues is not OK. And don’t blame kids at preschool for war,” Weinberg said in an interview. “I mean, that’s not terribly profound.”
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Israel names a street after renowned Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever
The Israeli city of Netanya has renamed one of its streets Rechov Avrom Sutzkever (Abraham Sutzkever Street), after the renowned Yiddish poet and Vilna partisan.
The event on June 10 marked an important cultural moment, recognizing the legacy of a poet who devoted his life to Yiddish language and Jewish culture. During his lifetime, Sutzkever was celebrated not only for his poetry, but also for editing the storied Yiddish literary magazine Di goldene keyt (The Golden Chain) for 46 years. His work remains a fixture in the field of Yiddish literature today.
Sutzkever was born in 1913 in the shtetl of Smorgon, in what is now Belarus. During World War I, his family moved to Siberia, where his father, Hertz Sutzkever, died. In 1921, his mother Rayne moved the family to Vilnius, where Sutzkever attended cheder.
Sutzkever survived the Vilna Ghetto. He was a leader of the “Paper Brigade” that rescued Jewish cultural treasures from the Nazis and later became the only Jewish witness called by the Soviets to testify at the Nuremberg Trials.
His poetry chronicled his childhood in Siberia, his life in the Vilna ghetto and his escape to join the Jewish partisans. In 1947 he settled in Palestine, later Israel.
In Israel, he continued to create, publish and preserve Yiddish culture for decades. Yet, despite his immense influence around the world, he remained less known in Israel because he chose to write and fight for the Yiddish language rather than switch to Hebrew.
This is the first time a street in Israel has been named after him. Even Tel Aviv never did so, despite the fact that Sutzkever lived there for many years and the city was once a hotbed of Yiddish cultural activity, due to the influx of Yiddish-speaking immigrants who settled there after the Holocaust.
The street-naming ceremony was attended by the Mayor of Netanya, Avi Slama; representatives of the Lithuanian Embassy; public figures, artists, and members of the family, including Sutzkever’s granddaughter, Hadas Kalderon.
In the past decade, Kalderon has been instrumental in keeping Abraham Sutzkever’s memory alive, most notably through two documentary films: Ver Vet Blaybn? (Who Will Remain?) in 2021, and Black Honey: The Life and Poetry of Avraham Sutzkever in 2018.
Kalderon told me that she was very moved by Netanya’s decision to name the street after her grandfather, in a garden overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. “It was not only a tribute to Sutzkever himself, but also a powerful moment of recognition for Yiddish language and culture within the State of Israel,” she said.
The post Israel names a street after renowned Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever appeared first on The Forward.
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At the dawn of the World Cup, the story of the Jews who helped bring soccer to America
When the North American FIFA World Cup starts in Mexico City on June 11, the story will largely be told through the familiar lenses of Lionel Messi, the geography of the 48 participants and three hosts, and — because 75% of the games will be played there — the continuing rise of soccer in the United States. But there is another, less familiar story woven through the tournament: the long, strange and often overlooked history of Jews in North American soccer.
Mostly that’s been in the United States where players and owners have included a larger proportion of Jews than in Canada and Mexico. By my count, no Jewish players have represented Mexico, and only two Jewish men have represented Canada at senior international level and one of them, Tomer Chencinski, only did so once, in a friendly game where Canada lost 2-0 to Belarus in Doha. (Daniel Haber played 5 international games in his career).
For whatever reason, whether more closely linked to Europe, denied entry to other sports, or just arbiters of excellent taste, Jewish Americans have been at the forefront of soccer in the United States for over a century. The first American to play for a major European team was Eddy Hamel for Ajax Amsterdam in 1922. Hamel was a New York-born winger who became a star for Ajax in Amsterdam during the 1920s. An injury forced his retirement in the 1930s and, after the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, he was deported and murdered at Auschwitz in 1943. His story remains one of the most tragic intersections of Jewish history and world football.
Jews also comprised the largest soccer crowd in America when 46,000 New Yorkers watched Hakoach Vienna play New York All Stars in 1926. That record stood for over 50 years but it also encouraged a number of members of the Hakoach team to emigrate to the US and start a New York team that was a crucial part of the American Soccer League of the era.
Later, in the 1970s, the National American Soccer League — the glitzy NASL — became a success thanks to the glamorous New York Cosmos. As head of Warner Communications, their CEO Steve Ross, born Rechnitz, was the person who brought Pele over and made the league the star-studded affair it became. After Herman Sarkowsky co-founded the Seattle Sounders, the continent was almost ready for football.
When the NASL faded and folded, soccer dwindled as a major sport in the United States. Alan Rothenberg saw an opportunity to revive the sport by hosting the 1994 World Cup and founding the MLS as a reset. As president of the U.S. Soccer Federation and the chief executive of the World Cup USA 1994 organizing committee, he made both of those happen and laid the foundations for the current shape of U.S. soccer.
The success of the MLS was not a foregone conclusion, though; indeed, it barely survived to the millennium. It was founded in 1993 but only started playing in 1996 — losing an estimated $350 million between its founding and 2004. The league initially turned to Don Garber, a former NFL executive, in August 1999 but even he couldn’t turn it around. By late 2001, it looked like the league would fold like its predecessors but it was able to secure new financing from owners Lamar Hunt, Philip Anschutz, and the Kraft family to take on more teams. Over the past 20 years, it has become robust, enjoying the general boom of all things soccer, riding the coattails of the English Premier League.
Without Robert Kraft and Anschutz, Major League Soccer might not exist today. During the league’s precarious early years, the two billionaire owners absorbed enormous losses to keep the fledgling competition alive. Kraft, the owner of the NFL’s New England Patriots, was also a central figure in bringing the 2026 World Cup to North America. As chairman of the United Bid Committee, he played a crucial role in securing the tournament for the United States, Canada and Mexico.
If Kraft represents one side of the Jewish soccer story, Chuck Blazer represents another.
The larger-than-life American soccer executive helped expose corruption inside FIFA, serving as a key witness in the investigations that ultimately toppled some of the most powerful figures in world football. Yet Blazer was a product of the very system he later helped unravel. His spectacular rise and fall remains one of the strangest chapters in soccer history, a tale of luxury apartments, exotic pets and global corruption.
Unlike baseball, basketball or boxing, soccer never became known as a major arena of Jewish achievement in the United States. Perhaps that has been due to the historic lack of status for soccer in the country. Despite the excellence of Yael Averbuch West for the USWNT and a number of Jewish players for the USMNT including Jonathan Bornstein, Benny Feilhaber, Dan Calichman, DeAndre Yedlin, Kyle Beckerman and the maverick Yari Alnutt there have been no soccer equivalents of Sandy Koufax or Hank Greenberg.
The stalwart defender Jeff “Goose” Agoos came closest with 134 international appearances and six more for the U.S. soccer Olympic team. But playing with a mediocre USMNT, he enjoyed few legendary moments. In fact, arguably no professional moments outshone the bizarre story of his 1989 NCAA championship ring in his junior year, the season that he played in the Maccabiah. On Dec. 3 of that year, his Virginia Cavalier team (playing for future USMNT coach Bruce Arena) met the top ranked, undefeated Santa Clara team in a freezing cold stadium in Piscataway, N.J. The teams were still tied 1-1 after FOUR overtimes and, with no penalties on the books, they shared the spoils. It was the third time that two teams shared the championship and has never happened again.
This year’s USMNT squad does include the only Jewish player at this summer’s tournament — reserve goalkeeper Matt Turner. If, as coach Mauricio Pochettino plans, Turner exclusively warms the bench, he will take his place alongside many of America’s notable Jewish soccer figures who have furthered the game, even if not on the field.
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‘Remember the Liberty’ has become code for ‘Israel Is Evil’
The first tragedy of the U.S.S. Liberty attack is that it happened at all. The second is that Israel’s critics have weaponized it to spread hate.
When Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky stood on the House floor on June 8, the 59th anniversary of the attack, and called for a Congressional probe into the incident, he wasn’t seriously trying to bring the truth of some long-buried historical secret to light. Massie, who in 14 years never once brought up the U.S.S. Liberty on the House floor, was using the latest cudgel in the Israel-haters’ arsenal to level one last official blow at a country he loathes.
“I’ve got a call to action for everybody here,” said Massie, speaking of attack survivors who were in the audience, “Honor these individuals. Quit ignoring that they exist. Let’s have an investigation. It’s long overdue.”
Let’s put aside the fact that there have been numerous official investigations into what exactly happened on June 8, 1967, the second day of the Six Day War, when Israeli aircraft and torpedo boats attacked the Liberty off the Sinai Peninsula, killing 34 American service members.
These investigations concluded that the tragedy was a friendly-fire incident. The Israelis initially mistook the Liberty, an intelligence-gathering vessel, for an Egyptian warship. After the smoke cleared, they accepted responsibility, apologized and paid $12 million in compensation to the victims.
Of all the explanations, it’s perhaps the least satisfying but the most logical. During the Vietnam War, happening at the same time, an estimated 11% to 15% of casualties were from friendly fire.
Massie’s call for a new investigation would be more believable if he then didn’t go on to recite the alternative one-sided narrative of the incident long pushed by some survivors and now taken up with gusto by Israel haters Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson and others.
To them the attack was deliberate: The Israelis ignored the large American flag the Liberty was flying and began shooting.
“It was intentional murder by the country of Israel,” said Massie on the House floor, “either as a false flag operation or because they simply didn’t want anybody observing what they were doing that day.”
What Massie and his fellow conspiracy theorists are alleging is a crime, but none of them has sufficiently proven a motive. Why would Israel attack the ship of its most important and powerful ally?
The false flag theory — the idea that Israel wanted to sink the Liberty, blame Egypt or the Soviet Union for it and draw America into the war — makes no sense.
The war was all but won by June 8. Moreover, as the historian and former Israeli ambassador to the United States Michael Oren relates in Six Days of War, the Israelis actually stopped firing initially when they suspected the ship was American.
The Israelis sent helicopters to investigate, but heavy smoke obscured the ship. Meanwhile, as Israeli torpedo boats closed in, a U.S. Navy crewman, perhaps not hearing his commander’s orders, opened fire.
The Israelis, now convinced it was an enemy ship, unleashed torpedoes, killing 25 Americans.
Massie left all this out of his narrative. He quoted then-Secretary of State Dean Rusk, who said at the time, “the attack was, quite literally incomprehensible,” implying that a murky conspiracy underlay it all.
But he didn’t include the rest of what Rusk said: That what happened was “an act of military recklessness reflecting wanton disregard for human life.”
In other words, Rusk’s full quote doesn’t suggest intention, but gross carelessness, which is a far cry from premeditated murder. It was chaos, miscommunication, uncertainty, incompetence, fear — the fog of war.
But to Massie and others, there’s no need to establish a coherent motive for why Israel attacked its harmless friends, because in their minds that’s just who Israelis are.
If Massie wants another investigation, fine. But I find it hard to believe that any investigation that doesn’t find Israel guilty of murder in the first will ever satisfy him or the people for whom “Remember the Liberty” is shorthand for “Israel is evil.”
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