News

Jewish Security Alliance of NY/NJ will share intelligence, resources and training to safeguard synagogues, schools, community centers and other Jewish institutions.

The Holocaust Council at Jewish Federation of Greater MetroWest is committed to telling the stories of the Shoah so that we “Never Forget,” the lives of the 6 million murdered, and continue to learn from the most horrific period in human history.

In celebration of Women’s History Month, we are spotlighting Linda Scherzer, Director of the JCRC of Greater MetroWest.

JERUSALEM — When Sigal Kanotopsky was a child, her family left their mountain-ringed Jewish village in northern Ethiopia to make a five-and-a-half-week trek to Sudan. They traveled only at night for safety, using the cover of forests to sleep during the day. On the way the family lost Sigal’s 3-year-old brother, Negusie, and buried him by the side of the road.

In a dimly lit conference room on an upper floor of a Chicago mid-rise, an intricately detailed snapshot of American peril is being taken, minute by unsettling minute. Reports from around the country — of gunshots, bomb threats, menacing antisemitic posts — flash across more than a dozen screens. A half-dozen analysts with backgrounds in the military or private intelligence are watching them, ready to alert any one of thousands of synagogues, community centers or day schools that appear to be at risk. Often, the analysts are the first to call.

On May 9, I was part of a delegation of the Jewish Agency for Israel that accompanied Ethiopian olim (immigrants) from Addis Ababa to Ben Gurion Airport and new lives in Israel. The mother had made aliyah in 1982 as part of Operation Moses, when Ethiopian Jewish immigrants trekked for weeks through the Sudan, hiding out from authorities in the daytime and walking by moonlight, to reach Israeli Mossad agents, who were secretly facilitating their transport to Israel.