With antisemitism on the rise, Utah Jews beef up security for ‘Super Bowl’ of holidays

Utah Jews have spent weeks preparing their homes, their synagogues and their lives for High Holy Days, which begin Friday with Rosh Hashana, the Jewish new year, and end 10 days later with Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.

It is a time of celebrating and greeting, praying and preaching, renewing and reflecting, forgiving and being forgiven.

For Rabbi Samuel Spector of east Salt Lake City’s Congregation Kol Ami, it is the “Super Bowl” of Jewish holidays.

Sadly, it also has become a time for all rabbis to worry about security at their synagogues amid a rise in antisemitism.

“We have to hire two or three police officers for all our services,” says Spector, adding that they are held “pretty much around the clock.”

Larger congregations, including the one he served in Los Angeles, have full-time security officers, but Kol Ami cannot afford that.

The congregation is spending a half-million dollars in the next few years to beef up the synagogue’s security features, including a wall around the sacred structure’s perimeter, ballistic film on the windows and additional cameras.

While Kol Ami hasn’t experienced any violent attacks, it has received threatening emails, calls and letters.

“We want to prevent people who should not be in the building from getting in,” he says. “It’s a sad reality that is happening all over the country.”

Two years ago, a swastika was etched into the glass entrance door of Chabad Lubavitch of Utah, a synagogue in Salt Lake City’s Sugar House neighborhood.

Antisemitism is “not worse here than other places,” Spector says, “but we are not immune.”

In 2017, Jay Jacobson, a retired physician and member of Kol Ami, was deeply troubled by the racist assaults on Black and Jewish Americans in Charlottesville, Va.

At the time, Jacobson was the president of Utah’s United Jewish Federation and helped create a task force on antisemitism. The group also noted attacks on other minorities — including Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Muslims and Sikhs.

Then came the mass shooting in 2018 at a Pittsburgh synagogue. It “wasn’t a surprise,” Jacobson says with sorrowful resignation. But Salt Lake City’s response was.

There was an “outpouring of concern and multiple vigils at several synagogues,” he says. “We saw a wealth of concern for many communities in the state.”

So the task force, now called Partners Against Hate, expanded participation to include diverse populations.

“We are working hard at every level — community, state and national — to educate people,” he says, “and to improve reporting of hate crimes, which are dramatically underreported.”

Most Jewish Utahns have not been personally threatened with a beating or with a gun, Jacobson says, but hate goes beyond physical violence.

There are ways to demean others through stereotypes, jokes and generalizations that are cruel, he says. “It can be a horrible experience for all minorities to go to high school, for example, when they are not in the majority.”

The retiree points to reports of racism in Davis County and Park City as examples.

Individual Jews are not easily identified by their looks, so if a person hates them, that makes their gathering places vulnerable.

Jacobson hopes that one day Utah will have a reputation as the opposite of Pittsburgh, Buffalo, N.Y., and Christchurch, New Zealand, where Jews, Blacks and Muslims were targeted.

“We want to be a place where these attacks don’t happen,” he says, “a state that understands what leads to prejudice and discrimination, and is working hard to prevent them whenever possible.”

Jacobson would like to see the Beehive State as “safe and welcoming of minorities as it was with visitors to the Olympics.”

Until antisemitism is eliminated, however, the charismatic Spector will continue to hire police to protect those who wish to begin the Jewish New Year in a site of safety and serenity.