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What you need to know today
- Synagogue security: Following the attack Friday night at Manhattan’s Central Synagogue, Mitchell Silber, CEO of the Community Security Initiative, is urging the police to identify hot spots for potential hate crimes and to place more officers in those areas. “It’s difficult, because you’re trying to balance being open for the public for worship, and at the same time, keeping our sanctuary safe,” Silber told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Sunday. The suspect, Larry Montes, 46, was apprehended by a security guard at the scene after shouting antisemitic slurs and striking a 63-year-old congregant. He now faces a host of charges, including four counts of assault as a hate crime.
- The second annual Sephardic Rabbinic Conference convened in Manhattan Monday for a two-day gathering aimed at training 150 rabbis, communal leaders and young professionals from a dozen countries on pastoral care, strengthening connections to Israel and building Sephardic institutions. “There’s clearly been a lack of [Sephardic] representation in a lot of mainstream Jewish institutions — in federations, in schools —- a lack of our needs being seen and heard,” Ethan Marcus, managing director of Sephardic Brotherhood of America and co-organizer of the conference, told Jewish Insider.
- Security Partnership: First responders from Magen David Adom, Israel’s national emergency response service, trained volunteers from the Community Security Service, a nonprofit that trains Jewish community members on security methods, on how to treat victims following large-scale attacks in Westchester County last week, the Times of Israel reports. The training was a part of a new partnership announced last week between CSS and American Friends of Magen David Adom.
- Debbie Saslaw, the co-founder of a political production company that worked with the Mamdani campaign during the mayoral election, told the New York Post that she was “obviously mistaken” after she wrote on social media that the man who attacked Central Synagogue was an Orthodox Jew. “Apparently this guy was an orthodox jew who was lashing out at jews. I wouldn’t call that an ‘antisemitic attack,’” Saslaw wrote in a since-deleted post on X. Myriam Montes, the aunt of the suspect, Larry Montes, 46, told the New York Post that he was “mentally traumatized” because of his desire to belong to Judaism.
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