Next month it will be four years since terror came to a synagogue in San Diego.
On April 27 of 2019, on the last day of the Jewish Passover, a 19 year old opened fire inside the Chabad of Poway killing one woman and wounding three other people.
Memories of that day have been stirred up by this week’s report from the Anti-Defamation League that cases of anti-Semitism in the U.S. last year have climbed by 36-percent over 2021..with close to four thousand incidents.
They involved physical violence, vandalism, harassment and a professor being shot to death in Arizona and a gunman holding hostages at a synagogue in Texas threatening to shoot members of the congregation until police shot him dead.
Many synagogues since the attack in Poway and elsewhere in these recent years have hired guards and have installed metal detectors so congregations are better protected.
So what it is going on with anti-Semitic incidents reaching the highest level since 1979 according to this new report? And why? And is it a warning of what could be ahead?
As the Executive Director of the Anti-Defamation League put it, “We know that what starts by targeting Jews rarely stops there.”
And with what we see happening too often in the news these days, there is evidence that hate does have a way of spreading...unless things and people change.
(Photo Getty Images)
Photo: AFP via Getty Images