A Sky News report published on Sunday detailed how U.S. Jewish communities are addressing growing security challenges amid a surge in violent antisemitic incidents in recent years, most notably the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue massacre in which 11 Jewish worshipers were murdered by a white supremacist gunman.
“Antisemitism is one of the oldest forms of hatred, it’s been around for a long time,” Jeff Finkelstein, CEO of the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh, told Sky News. “We’ve been lucky in America where it’s been kind of buried below the surface.”
“As I think we’ve seen around the world, with a rise in all forms of hatred, antisemitism has popped its head up in a really horrific way, here in the United States and around the world,” he added.
Watch the Sky News report here:
Eric Fingerhut — president and CEO of the Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA), which in 2021 launched the $130 million LiveSecure campaign to bolster the protection of Jewish institutions — said, “Over the last decade or more, it’s become apparent that one of the core responsibilities of each federation for its communities is safety and security and that the efforts needed to grow significantly in sophistication and in numbers because of the rise of antisemitism and the consequent rise in violent incidents.
“Since Pittsburgh, which was October of 2018, there were maybe 15 or 20 committees that had (security) programs — now, there are over 95,” Fingerhut noted.
Sky News joined a training session held by the Jewish Federation of Southern New Jersey at a community center in Wilmington, Delaware. At the core of the main message offered to the two dozen participants were the principles of “run, hide, fight.”
“The real root of it is to teach situational awareness and response to an active threat and reinforce that as a life skill, so that people have an understanding that it’s not simply just a focus when they’re in synagogue, or maybe at the Jewish community center, but something that they should incorporate into their daily routine, their daily life,” Bud Monaghan — executive director of JFed Security, LLC, an agency of the Jewish Federation of Southern New Jersey — said. “Because the state of affairs unfortunately in the world today — it’s something (in which) people critically need to enhance their survivability in the event that they’re caught in a situation with an active threat or an active shooter.”
