More Jews are learning to fight anti-Semitism — with their hands
NEW YORK — When the first-time students from Chabad of Eastern Queens paired up and started practicing how to defend against a knife attack, laughter echoed through the room.
“Why are you smiling?” said their stern-faced instructor, Avi Abraham. “Stop laughing. This is not a joke.”
It’s a common reaction new students have when simulating violence with each other, said Abraham, founder of New York Self Defense Academy in Queens, N.Y. His biggest challenge is teaching them to flip the switch in their mind in order to become aggressive enough to protect themselves if needed.
That’s an unfamiliar state of being for many observant Jews who dedicate their energies to their families and religious studies. Yet it is a necessary component of life when Jews are being targeted, “and we as Jewish people have to know how to do that,” said Rabbi Yerachmiel Zalmanov, director of Chabad of Eastern Queens.
Zalmanov joined his group for their first class, watching and recording the action on his phone. He never dreamed that Jews in New York would have to defend themselves from violent attacks, he said. There are a lot of young families in the community who are afraid to go to synagogue. Chabad centers have become soft targets, he said.
Chabad is a global Orthodox Jewish Hasidic movement founded in 1775. It was originally based in Russia and then Poland, and is now centered in Brooklyn since World War II. The distinctive Orthodox clothing of men and women stands out in public, and Chabad members have been targeted in separate incidents of street attacks in recent months in New York, in the hearts of the large Hasidic communities in Brooklyn and Monsey.
The result is that many Jews don’t feel safe, Zalmanov said. “They’re not comfortable with themselves. We need to bring this confidence to people, to be proud of who we are and not to be afraid.”
Several self-defense training programs, like the mixed martial arts workshops by Legion, cater to the New York metropolitan area’s 1.5 million Jews. It is the largest metropolitan Jewish community outside of Israel.
Local officials had been encouraging him to push his community to be better prepared to protect itself, he said. After watching his group, he wants other shul leaders to follow suit. It doesn’t need to be everyone, just a designated group that is willing to take responsibility for others’ safety in the event of an attack.
Abraham designed his training program to prepare such a group to be the first response in the critical few minutes of a range of scenarios, from knife attacks to mass shooters like the one in Pittsburgh in 2018. He and his assistants do sessions in Krav Maga, the hand-to-hand combat style used by the Israeli Defense Forces, at his studio. They also travel to synagogues and other houses of worship around the region to do active shooter training simulations.
It’s all about preparing a core group of volunteers who can save lives before police arrive, said Abraham, who has taught Krav Maga for 23 years.
“We pick between 12 to 20 people who would be willing to — let’s suppose it’s this way — to sacrifice their life in case something happens, for the rest of the community,” he said.
While everyone agrees that anti-Semitism is increasing, it is difficult to quantify because incidents go unreported and groups that track incidents use different rubrics to measure it. Law enforcement agencies have to determine whether an assault or a Swastika drawn on a bathroom wall was motivated by hatred toward Jews or some other factor.
Still, the numbers are concerning officials around the country. The Anti-Defamation League recorded 1,879 attacks in the U.S. in 2018. That was a 5 percent decrease from 2017, but 48 percent higher than in 2016 and 99 percent more than in 2015. The ADL has an interactive H.E.A.T. Map — “Hate, Extremism, Anti-Semitism, Terrorism” — by which users can search incidents by state or city, incident type, ideology and years.
New York City counted 229 anti-Semitic hate crimes last year, up from 185 in 2018.
“God forbid,” Zalmanov said, “if something happens, we should be ready to give the right answer.”
Micah Danney is a Poynter-Koch fellow and a reporter and associate editor for Religion Unplugged. He is an alumnus of the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY and has reported for news outlets in the NYC area, interned at The Times of Israel and covered religion in Israel for the GroundTruth Project.