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Veteran Jewish security expert warns that today’s threats must be met with proactive resistance

Like many American Jews who have been content to assimilate over the last half-century, basking in the warmth of what seemed to be a morally and ethically righteous era in our country’s tolerance of those outside the white Christian circle of humanity, Evan Bernstein admits to being one of the complacent ones. The aura of religious and racial tolerance whitewashed most of the overt signs of racism and anti-Semitism that slowly crept back into the nation’s landscape. Anti-Semitism was something that happened in Europe, not here, they said. Then things changed.

On the eve of Passover in April of 2014, a 73-year-old former Ku Klux Klan leader walked into the Jewish Community Center of Greater Kansas City and at a Jewish retirement community, Village Shalom, both in Overland Park, Kan., and opened fire killing three people — two at the community center and one in the retirement community. 

Four years later, the worst massacre of American Jews in this country occurred at the Tree of Life synagogue in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood, home to about one-fourth of the Jewish residents of greater Pittsburgh. A gunman, who later told police that he “wanted all Jews to die,” slaughtered 11 worshippers during Saturday morning services.

And last year, a 19-year-old avowed white supremacist entered the Chabad of Poway synagogue on the last day of Passover in Poway, Calif. Approximately 100 people were inside the synagogue. The gunman, carrying a semiautomatic rifle and wearing a tactical vest which contained five magazines of 10 rounds each, shot and killed a 60-year-old woman and then wounded the congregation’s rabbi.

For Jews like Bernstein, life was good – until it wasn’t.  

See the full article in Security Infowatch here