‘Incredible trauma’: Shock rise in anti-Jewish attacks
Hate crimes have increased in America, but the group being targeted most — by attackers ranging from white supremacist groups to left-wing extremists — is the Jewish community.
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When the bullets started flying in the gritty Jersey City neighbourhood of Greenville on a cold afternoon a couple weeks before Christmas, it was first reported as a drug bust gone wrong.
After killing a detective who approached their van at a cemetery, two shooters lay siege from a small grocery store on December 10, firing hundreds of rounds into the street for close to an hour before being shot dead by police.
Six people died in the dramatic shootout, including three who were inside the deli when David Anderson, 47, and his accomplice Francine Graham, 50, burst in.
Much of it caught on video, the attack was a shocking crime story playing out in real time online and on TV, but as the victims and perpetrators were identified, it emerged as something more sinister.
Anderson and Graham were revealed as connected to extremist group, the Black Hebrew Israelites, and authorities quickly came to the conclusion they were domestic terrorists who had targeted the Kosher store and its Orthodox Jewish owners.
Hate crimes are up across the board in increasingly divided America, but the group being targeted most, and by attackers ranging from far right and white supremacist groups to left wing extremists and even everyday citizens, are Jews.
More than half the hate crimes last year in New York were against Jewish people, according to New York Police Department data, while the Anti Defamation League reports anti Semitic attacks have doubled since 2015.
These include an elderly man having his teeth smashed by a brick from a passerby in Brooklyn in August, before teenagers in skullcaps were assaulted and a woman and her children attacked. Swastikas have been painted in Jewish neighbourhoods and a week after the Greenville shootings a local school official took to social media to slam new Orthodox family arrivals, who she claimed were hurting the neighbourhood.
This came barely a year after the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh saw eleven parishioners slaughtered during morning services by a white supremacist.
Last week, towards the end of the Jewish holy celebration of Hanukkah, five people were wounded, one critically, when mentally disturbed Grafton Thomas, 38, stormed the home of a rabbi in an Hasidic community north of New York with a machete the size of a broom.
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The daughter of the gravely wounded Josef Neumann, 72, who remained in a coma, on Thursday said her family was praying he would wake up to “a changed world”.
“We want our kids to go to school and feel safe,” said Nicky Kohen.
“We want to go to synagogues and feel safe. We want to go to grocery stores and malls and feel safe.”
While anti-Semitism has a long and tragic history, the recent spike in attacks has galvanised New York, home to the biggest Jewish population outside of Israel. Thousands are expected to gather for a peace march on Sunday from Lower Manhattan over the Brooklyn Bridge.
Anti Defamation League associate director Aryeh Tuchman said Jews in the US had suffered “incredible trauma” in recent years.
“In New York there are 10 or 12 attacks that we’re counting in December alone. That is a dramatic number,” he told News Corp Australia.
The fact that disparate social groups are targeting Jews has become a topic of fierce debate in America. New York Mayor Bill De Blasio is among many who blame the current divisiveness on the rhetoric of US President Donald Trump, however Trump’s supporters say the fact that several attacks have been committed by people of colour bucks the narrative of MAGA-hat wearing white supremacists being responsible.
“These attacks speak to the need for on a local level or on a regional level, to do more, to fight anti-Semitism and specifically to look at ways of enhancing relationships between Jews and other communities of colour,” said Mr Tuchman.
“We need to be a little nuanced about this. When it comes to extremist ideologies, such as white supremacy, Jews have always been the target of their hatred and violence, that’s not surprising at all. To understand that you only have to scratch the surface of white supremacist ideology to know that they blame Jews for a whole host of societal ills …. as crazy as that is,” he said.
“But you have other extremist groups who have their own anti Jewish ideology and that would include people like the black Hebrew Israelites, for example, and that is an extremist group. That’s an extremist ideology that highly anti Semitic components.
“When you ask why would people who are not affiliated with an extremist ideology, why would they attack Jews, whether they’re white or whether they’re black? Whatever race it is, why would people attack Jewish people? Well, that’s a great question. And I think that you need to go and look at local conditions, regional conditions. You need to look at the general currents of bigotry and tension in society.
“It’s very hard to say why, but this quickly becomes a question not of why different groups are attacking Jews, but why do any groups attack Jews?”
Originally published as ‘Incredible trauma’: Shock rise in anti-Jewish attacks