With anti-Semitism on the rise in CT, ‘we now always lock our doors’

By Jessica Simms

The Jewish Federation of Greater New Haven’s staff spent time designing a story walk program — a program they made because of COVID-19. The staff and the program’s participants were excited to gather safely for a December story walk that took place at Racebrook Park in Orange.

They put up little lawn sign storyboards throughout the park, and as children walked through, they could read different segments of that month’s story, “Hanukkah with Friends” by Chris Barash, on the signs. Participants could look at the book’s illustrations, read passages from the story and learn more about what happens during Hanukkah. One sign taught the children about playing dreidel, a game with a four-sided spinning top. 

However, a day after they set up the walk, it was destroyed. The storyboards were thrown in the stream and dangled from the trees. After putting it back together, people wrecked it again. A family was nice enough to put the walk back together, but by the next day, it was dismantled again.

That was the last straw for the federation staff. They ended up sending the participants to Camp Laurelwood in Madison to attend a different story walk.

This anti-Semitic incident is just one local act of hostility and animosity toward the Jewish people. The Anti-Defamation League has reported that these acts have increased over the last five years.

“I don’t think that one of the reasons is that there are more hateful people being created,” ADL Connecticut associate director Andy Friedland said. “But I do think that hateful people who have always been here have felt in the last couple of years that the environment is right for them to speak up and make their hateful views heard.”

The story walk is an outgrowth of PJ Library, a free books and library program. Once a month, a Jewish book or another form of media comes in for the children participants. As a result of this anti-Semitic act, the program now occurs privately so it is easier to control as the staff felt that it was not welcome in the public.

“It was a little disturbing because there were good Samaritans who put it back together and then people came in and continued to destroy it, so we realized quickly that the culture right now is just unfortunate,” said Judy Alperin, chief executive officer of the federation.

On May 12, 2020, the ADL released a statement that said that the American Jewish community experienced the highest level of anti-Semitic incidents in 2019 since the ADL started tracking in 1979.

In total, 2019 had more than 2,100 acts of assault, vandalism and harassment.

Even though this statement discussed anti-Semitism in 2019, Connecticut rabbis and Jewish leaders suggest that anti-Semitism continues to be a growing issue across the nation.

“I think anti-Semitism was always there, but I think it was under wraps and then we had a President of the United States who lifted the lid on the sewer and everything came out from the sewer,” said Rabbi Benjamin Scolnic of Temple Beth Sholom in Hamden, Connecticut.

“Certain things that (former President Donald Trump) did to encourage certain groups and the focal point was the thing that happened in Charlottesville, (Virginia).”

The 2017 Charlottesville “Unite the Right” gathering was “the largest and most violent public assembly of white supremacists in decades,” according to the ADL.

Just at that rally alone, the ADL reported many different forms of anti-Semitic incidents including harassment, vandalism and violence.

Along with those acts, some Connecticut rabbis mentioned a phrase chanted throughout the gathering — “The Jews will not replace us!”

“What does that mean?” Scolnic said. “Replace who? … It’s something about people who are not Jewish are afraid that the Jewish people somehow are taking over, and it’s vague what they are talking about … What is it about?”

Rabbi Brian Immerman of Congregation Mishkan Israel in Hamden said the chant indicates that some people may still view the Jews as outsiders.

“There’s a part of me that says, ‘What are you bringing Jews into this for?’” Immerman said. “And then on the other hand, it’s a reminder that there’s a part of the Jewish community that’s always kind of ‘be the other.’”

Immerman said the topic of anti-Semitism is personal since his grandmother was a Holocaust survivor.

Approximately six million Jews died in the Holocaust between 1934-1946.

“She left Berlin when she was 12 and came here when she was 16,” Immerman said. “Her family was so assimilated. They didn’t wear kippot … (they) thought that everything was going to be fine.”

Immerman agrees that anti-Semitism is not a new issue in the U.S, but what is unique is the brazen clarity with which anti-Semites have been speaking.

“As people are suffering, they want to blame others for causing it — Jews, immigrants, Blacks, Hispanics, Asians,” Immerman said. “Some people have just been taught always to hate.”

Immerman started at Mishkan Israel in 2018. Shortly before his tenure, someone painted a swastika, the sign of the Nazi’s Third Reich, on the synagogue’s building.

Events such as the 2018 shooting at Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh that killed 11 people, and the 2019 shooting at the Chabad of Poway synagogue in Poway, California, that killed one woman and injured three others, have impacted the Jewish community nationwide.

Immerman said his synagogue implemented new security procedures after the fatal violence.

“We now always lock our doors before 7 (p.m.),” Immerman said. “On Shabbat, we used to leave them open. Every time we have a public event that people are welcome to come, we have an armed security guard. Our building is significantly more secured because we realize there’s a real threat.”

Rabbi Michael Farbman of Temple Emanuel of Greater New Haven has served communities throughout Europe and said that he was shocked when he was able to easily enter a synagogue in the U.S.

Such is not possible in Europe.

Board members discussed locking the temple’s doors during religious services with someone standing at the door letting people in. However, they initially declined the idea as they wanted to be a welcoming community.

That changed after the Pittsburgh shooting.

“The very fact that we had to do this, and we did this very quietly,” Farbman said. “You can’t turn it into a fortress, you have to think about soft spots.”

Farbman said his synagogue installed metal bollards in the corner of the building to prevent someone from being able to drive their car into the building. Additionally, they increased the number of cameras to cover every angle outside of the building, and added protective film on windows.

Colleges and Universities

At a webinar called “Anti-Semitism on Campus: Are We Ensuring a Safe Environment for the Jewish community?” Frederick Lawrence, secretary and chief experience officer of Phi Beta Kappa Society and former president of Brandeis University, discussed two core values of society at academic institutions: free expression and building a diverse and inclusive community.

“For the American Jewish community, it has been one of the great blessings in the last century or more,” Lawrence said. “… Those things don’t always fit equally and evenly and easily together, so that’s part of the challenge here.”

As Ethan Felson, executive director of A Wider Bridge, said, “The campuses aren’t burning,” but not all students feel safe on campus.

“The problem is getting worse, at least in my observation,” Felson said.

At Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Rabbi Reena Judd of the Peter C. Hereld House said she has encountered anti-Semitism fewer than 10 times in the 16 years she has worked at the university. Most of the incidents occurred in residence halls where a student, who has never met a Jew, makes an offensive comment to their Jewish roommate.

“I’ll have a conversation with the person and I’ll say, ‘Do you know how bad it hurts to hear that?’” Judd said. “Then we’ll talk for two or three hours and they leave a better person.”

Judd said the most common occurrence on campus is when students “get their chops busted” for wanting to take off class on a Jewish holiday. The situation always gets resolved, she said.

When Judd was 4 years old, she said her mother was a librarian at Quinnipiac. In the beginning of her mother’s time at the university, when a faculty or staff member wanted to take a High Holiday off, they were docked personal pay, she said.

“It was different; this is ’68,” Judd said. “… There were like 2,600 students in all four years, it was like 85% women. It was teaching and allied health.”

Judd said “the bargain at the time” was the school would close for the Jews for a fall holiday, and it would close for Good Friday for the Christians.

“The vote amongst the Jewish faculty and staff at the time voted for Yom Kippur because technically Yom Kippur is the sabbath of sabbaths,” Judd said. “Yom Kippur is indeed the holiest of days in the Jewish calendar. Once you brought in Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, then you’re outdoing Good Friday.”

After about three years as the university rabbi, Judd said former Quinnipiac president John Lahey asked, “Would a house influence the community?”

Judd felt it would. After some discussion about whether the school should pay to build a new house or remodel an old one, Judd decided to take the old one to get it quicker.

However, Judd said a lot of people had issues about the house.

Before this house, Judd said her office was smaller than “the ladies room” in the student center, and the Jews would gather in a glass room upstairs in the student center. Since they prayed in the public, people could see the glow of the Shabbat candles through the glass as they walked by.

“The non-Jewish students would go, ‘Who’s that? What are they doing?’” Judd said. “They would stick their head in and go, ‘Oh,’ every single Shabbat.”

Since the Hereld House’s inception, Judd said about 15 students attend each Shabbat, but she works with approximately 120 students. Judd estimates that the university’s Jewish community is fewer than 500 students.

A couple of years ago, vandals drew anti-Semitic and anti-Latinx graffiti on a Fairfield University building at night, but by the next morning, campus security washed it off.

However, some campus staff saw it the night it happened, took photos of it and sent it to others.

Since the Fairfield campus is open to the public, Ellen Umansky, Carl and Dorothy Bennett professor of Judaic Studies and director of the Bennett Center for Judaic Studies, said there is no way to say a student did this, but students were angry that the university tried to cover it up.

“It led to a big student outrage — one of the few student protests we’ve had in the 27 years I’ve been here,” Umansky said.

Other than that, Umansky said students haven’t reported other incidents.

“Our student body is largely apolitical … So if the students cared more about the (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement or the Palestinians, then there might be some kind of anti-Israel that would turn into anti-Jewish incidents on campus, but I don’t see any evidence of students really caring about any of that,” Umansky said.

Along with that, there are very few Jewish and Muslim students at Fairfield. Umansky said both the Muslim and the Jewish student groups are allies “because both groups are really really the minority at Fairfield.”

On a campus that has a large population of Jewish students and in the past has not had many anti-Semitic incidents, it was strange when this past October, the University of Connecticut in Storrs had three occurrences of anti-Semitism in the form of vandalism.

When three incidents happened, Hillel president Dorri Jacobs said there was a lack of response from the university administration, which made Jewish students feel unsafe.

“I reached out personally to our president, to our chief diversity officer and asked for a response and asked why they were ignoring these incidents that are making students on their campus feel so unsafe,” Jacobs said at the webinar.

Jacobs’ action created a series of conversations between Jacobs and UConn’s president, Thomas Katsouleas.

Jacobs also wrote a letter and posted on the Hillel’s social media sites to bring the issue to light. More than 300 students signed the letter.

Katsouleas sent a statement to the university community that discussed the anti-Semitic incidents and how to combat them. Even after the president released the statement, Jacobs’ work was not finished.

She helped senators in the undergraduate student government to create legislation, which led to meetings with members of the administration about how they respond to biased incidents.

Jacobs also organized ADL events about becoming an upstander and how to fight anti-Semitism on campus.

So far during this semester, one anti-Semitic incident has occurred and the administration responded in an effective way.

“Now what we are working on is not being so reactionary, only working to fight anti-Semitism when it happens to us, but instead being proactive and educating people ahead of time so these incidents don’t occur at all,” Jacobs said.

Jacobs hopes to do this by working on providing training for resident assistants about how to fight anti-Semitism, creating educational videos that the university will distribute and creating connections with other cultural organizations on campus.

Hamden Public Schools

Keeping all students safe in Hamden schools is the most important thing that the administration does, said Superintendent Jody Goeler.

“Central to our work is the work that we are doing around professional development, curriculum development, instructional programming around equity, ensuring that our children are more sensitive to the diverse nature of our community, the community at large and to provide them the skills, sensitivities and dispositions to care about others, to ensure that others have a sense of belonging and feel belonging.”

However, Melissa Kaplan, board of education member and interim director of the honors program at Quinnipiac, said there are still ways for the district to improve upon keeping the schools a safe place for all students.

“The administration has really sought to be responsive, culturally responsive, and really focusing on increasing a sense of inclusion and belonging within our schools but also recognizing systemic and structural inequities,” Kaplan said.

“So I think a lot of what Hamden is doing is really proactive, but I also think a lot of it is also in response to events, as well. It’s kind of staying in front of it at all times. Sometimes we are also playing catch up and there are so many areas where I feel that there are much greater need for equity and various initiatives that I think are community driven.”

Goeler said there have been small anti-Semitic incidents since he became superintendent in 2014. One was a small swastika on a bathroom wall at Hamden High School.

“We took it down, we fully investigated it and we dealt with it as an urgent matter, just as we would with anyone else in our community experiencing anything related to hate and discrimination and bigotry,” Goeler said.

While there have not been many incidents of anti-Semitism in the Hamden schools, it is still on the rise throughout the nation.

Goeler and Kaplan, who are both Jewish, brought up the riots at the capitol building on Jan. 6, as some of the rioters wore shirts that said “Auschwitz,” which was the largest concentration camp during the Holocaust, and “6MWE,” meaning 6 million Jews wasn’t enough.

“I’m Jewish so I’m watching this stuff and I’m watching this guy who’s got a shirt with Auschwitz and I just never imagined that I would be witnessing the kinds of things that I have been witnessing as a citizen and it truly disgusts me as a human being and as a Jew and also as an educator and a leader,” Goeler said.

Kaplan was supposed to hold a curriculum meeting the evening of the riots, but canceled it as she didn’t feel like she was in the right mind to host a meeting. At the next one, she did issue a statement that spoke out against racism and anti-Semitism.

With it being the third generation since the Holocaust and more survivors are passing away, Kaplan said anti-Semitism is something that she thinks people are moving away from.

“I feel that there is something being lost, and so I think there are important lessons to be learned with study of the Holocaust,” Kaplan said. “In fact, nationwide there are only 16 states that actually require Holocaust education.”

Connecticut is one of these states, but a survey has indicated that two-thirds of U.S. millennials did not know what Auschwitz was.

“There are over 1.1 million people that were murdered at Auschwitz and not just Jews, but homosexuals, people with disabilities,” Kaplan said. “It really is I think very sad that so many of our next generation are not learning about this and I think there are really important lessons to be learned.”

Goeler also believes that there is much more that Hamden students should be learning related to the Holocaust, such as a genocide course.

“I think the challenge is that there is so much to talk about,” Goeler said.

Importance of community connection

After events like the Pittsburgh shooting, communities tend to come together to support one another.

That happened at the Jewish Federation of Greater New Haven.

“After the horrible tragedy in Pittsburgh, within a couple of days we convened hundreds and hundreds, I mean the people were lining up outside like they backed up into the parking lot,” Alperin said.

“We had so many people who came out together, we had a vigil after that. It was powerful and it said all the right things and certainly we needed to come together, we needed to cry together, we needed to stand up together.”

However, Alperin does not want the community to only band together after a tragedy — she wants the community to come together to stand up to acts of hate.

“I want to gather us because we’re going to help to turn the tide and educate more and more people about what it means to not be a bystander, to stand up for good, when you see something, say something, to call out injustice, to fight for anybody who’s marginalized or not given an opportunity for freedom and full expression of who they are.”