There were more synagogue attacks this week than days in the week.
Last weekend: Three shootings at synagogues within a 10-mile radius in Toronto.
On Monday: In Liège, Belgium, a synagogue was bombed.
On Thursday at noon: A man with a rifle and explosives drove into a synagogue in West Bloomfield, Michigan.
On Thursday afternoon: In Trondheim, Norway, police arrested a man for suspicious behavior outside a synagogue.
On the earliest hours of Friday: There was an arson attack at a Rotterdam synagogue.
And that’s just the last seven days.
To say this is simply “rising antisemitism,” which is typically how the headlines put it, fails to miss the speed and severity of this virus. We are living through an alarming, historic period in which the guardrails that previously kept this hate at bay have fallen away.
It’s happening in places with large Jewish communities, and those with just a handful of Jews. In America, a country once thought of as the best place in the world to be Jewish, 70 percent of all religion-based hate crimes are directed at Jews, a group that makes up less than 3 percent of the population.
It’s our job to keep up with all of it—and even we are struggling. If we can’t, and it’s our job to live and breathe this, how can you?
Thus this new, weekly round-up. This Week in Jew-Hate is meant to summarize the speed and severity of the virus. You can sign up here to receive it. Not exactly the most fun read of the week (but then you have TGIF for that). But, we think it’s work worth doing. By collecting these incidents in one place each week, we hope to restore a sense of perspective that was lost after October 7, 2023. To make sure these attacks are shown for what they are. To see the world as it is, not as we would like it to be.
–The Editors
Armed Attacker Rams Michigan Synagogue
Shortly after lunchtime on Thursday, an attacker armed with a rifle rammed a truck through the entrance doors of Temple Israel in West Bloomfield Township, Michigan, driving through a hallway before synagogue security opened fire. The suspect died inside the vehicle after it caught fire; the cause of death remains under investigation. A security guard was struck by the truck and knocked unconscious but is expected to recover. All 140 students at the synagogue’s early childhood center, as well as staff and teachers, were uninjured. The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security responded to the scene with local police. The FBI said that it had conducted active-shooter training with Temple Israel staff earlier this year. Our contributor Polina Fradkin, who’s from West Bloomfield, wrote about why she feels safer in a bomb shelter in Israel than in her hometown.
