NEW YORK, Jan. 13 (JTA) American Jewish Committee offices around the country are not stepping up security despite a string of hate mail received by chapters around the country.
The FBI is investigating threatening letters received by AJCommittee offices as well as by civil rights groups and black colleges.
Seventeen of the AJCommittee’s 32 chapters around the country received letters postmarked in Fayetteville, N.C., that say “we want to be ready to take this war to the next level on you kikes,” assert there never was a Holocaust and add “if there was, Hitler didn’t do a very good job.”
“In this business you always get crazy mail, but I don’t recall in the 10 years that I’ve worked here having the same letter being sent to the majority of our offices,” said Kenneth Stern, the AJCommittee’s specialist on anti-Semitism and extremism.
The AJCommittee already has stringent security outside its offices and is not implementing any further measures. “Security is obviously a concern at all times and remains so,” Stern said. “In this day and age, you have to be careful about what and who comes into your office.”
The chapters immediately reported the letters to law enforcement authorities and the U.S. Postal Service and have handed them over to the FBI for fingerprint analysis, Stern said.
No one knows who is responsible for the letters, but “there’s a hint” that it may be somehow connected to the World Church of the Creator, Stern said, because the letter refers to its founder Ben Klassen. The World Church of the Creator is the organization linked to last summer’s shootings of Jews and other minorities in the Midwest.
No other Jewish organizations have reported receiving the hate mail.
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