BLOG POST
Jewish leaders respond to antisemitic cyberattack on NY Jewish school
Jerusalem Post: By Haley Cohen DECEMBER 26, 2020
NEW YORK – New Yorkers remain on edge following the antisemitic cyberattack that took place at a Jewish high school in Great Neck on December 14. As the FBI continues its investigation, Jewish leaders are speaking out about proactive ways to mitigate further incidents.
“Nothing like this has ever happened in my hometown. I’ve never experienced antisemitism before,” Dina Silberstein told The Jerusalem Post. Silberstein, 37, is an alumna of North Shore Hebrew Academy, a Modern Orthodox yeshiva in Nassau County. On the fifth night of Hanukkah, the academy’s website was hacked, compromising students’ private information and targeting the community with antisemitic threats and slurs.On the school’s homepage, the North Shore logo was replaced with a swastika, the background image was changed to a Nazi concentration camp and the school’s name was modified to “North Shore Hebrew Concentration Camp.” Its address was changed to that of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
On another page, the hackers posted a picture of Hitler titled “Der Fuhrer Adolf Hitler,” and changed the school’s mission statement to read: “[At the] North Shore Concentration Camp… we believe in executing our Jews, not merely deporting them… we don’t want our Jews to continue being rats to finally erasing them from this Earth is much preferred.”
Silberstein, the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, said she learned about the attack when her sister texted photos. “We knew we had to do something, so I reached out to the ADL right away. They told me they had just heard and were in the process of organizing a webinar in response.”