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Going to Jewish Prayer Services in America Should Not Be an Act of Courage

(New York Times) Dr. Deborah E. Lipstadt - The hostage-taking at Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas, on Saturday came to a safe conclusion. A friend told me that whenever she walks into a synagogue she makes a mental check of the nearest exit and figures out where the safest place to hide is. Under a pew? In a storage closet? Behind the ark, which holds the sacred Torah scrolls? She was shocked when I said I don't do that. Yet. For decades, when I got directions to synagogues in countries outside my own, I didn't have to know the precise address. I was told I should just look for the police officers with the submachine guns. That's where the synagogue would be. Now American Jews like myself experience it at home - in our own synagogues. We look across the street at the big church and can't help but notice that there are no guards there. Jews are contemplating going underground. We are shaken. We are not OK. But we are resilient because we cannot afford not to be. Without that resilience, we would have disappeared centuries ago. We refuse to go away. But we are exhausted. This week we wonder if the eyes of our non-Jewish friends and neighbors, particularly the ones who didn't call to see if we were OK, have been opened just a bit. We are standing tall and we are standing straight. But we are checking for the exits. The writer, professor of modern Jewish history and Holocaust studies at Emory University, has been nominated to be the State Department special envoy to monitor and combat anti-Semitism.
2022-01-20 00:00:00
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