(CN) – The doors to the synagogue are a little less open. An audit released Tuesday found that while anti-Semitic incidents in general dropped slightly last year, the number of violent attacks doubled.
David Hoffman, the associate regional director in Atlanta for the Anti-Defamation League, or ADL, said the next generation of Jews will not know what it’s like to move to a new community and walk into a synagogue without first being stopped by a police officer or scrutinized by a security guard.
“It's disturbing to know that we're feeling less and less safe in the places we're supposed to find sanctuary, our synagogue,” Hoffman told Courthouse News. “That's something that Jews in America have never really had to experience.”
This is because the biggest spike of anti-Semitic incidents in America has left Jewish centers and places of worship reviewing security protocols, Hoffman said.
According to an ADL audit released Tuesday, the United States is still riding a spike in anti-Semitic incidents that began to climb 2016. And while the number dropped 5% from an all-time high in 2017, last year there were 1,879 incidents in America centered in states that have large Jewish populations, such as California, New York, Massachusetts and New Jersey.
That’s the third highest number of anti-Semitic incidents since the ADL started tracking them four decades ago.
ADL’s findings were punctuated by Saturday’s shooting in Poway, California that left one dead and four wounded at the Chabad of Poway synagogue, about 25 miles north of San Diego.
Speaking on a call with reporters, ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said Jews are “the canary in the coal mine” and when incidents motivated by hate rise against them, other forms of intolerance are often not far behind.
“So in 2019, in a climate where Muslims and immigrants are being scapegoated, when members of Congress are repeating anti-Semitic tropes, at a time when white supremacists are emboldened like never before, as we saw in Poway, there are real concerns about where we are headed as a country and as a society,” Greenblatt said.
The number of physical assaults on Jewish individuals increased to 39 people in 2018 – a 105% increase from the 19 assaults the year before, the ADL found.
That included the 11 people killed and two injured after a white supremacist attacked the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburg on Oct. 27.
According to Greenblatt, it was the deadliest attack of Jewish people on American soil.
From the Tree of Life attack, the ADL said, the number of incidents intensified as 2018 wound into the new year.
Known extremist groups were responsible for about 13% of the incidents – or 249 events – the ADL said, the majority of them holding white supremacist ideology.
Of the 1,879 anti-Semitic incidents last year, 1,066 were cases of harassment and 774 were vandalism cases.
Greenblatt noted extremists have felt emboldened. The incidents are not the scrawled swastika or desecrated Jewish cemetery.
“What seems new and troubling is the pervasiveness which these things have reached all quarters of society: this spike in just a few years, where we're nearly double where we were in 2015, and how they seem to be done in frankly a more public way,” Greenblatt said.
ADL collected the information by monitoring news reports and fielding calls from victims, police agencies and religious organizations reporting incidents to them.
The organization’s numbers are different than the data the FBI keeps on hate crimes or what a local police department might track. As Greenblatt explained, some of the incidents the ADL noted – such as harassment directed to a particular individual – might not rise to the level of a hate crime.
ADL also doesn’t track incidents on the web – unless it is directed at a Jewish individual, as opposed to the Jewish community at large. These are real-world incidents, although the ADL notes the online world influences these effects.
There was a silver lining in the report, however. The number of anti-Semitic incidents tracked by ADL that occurred in schools and universities fell 25% in 2018.
For Hoffman, that is heartening.
“We do a lot of work in K through 12 schools and on college campuses and with law enforcement because we see in the data that incidents were reported most at schools, whether it's K through 12 or college campuses,” he said. “And so that's where we recognize we need to do our work in terms of education and programming and working with different community task forces.”
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