Rabbi Robin Nafshi’s 30-day-long remembrance of victims of the shooting in Pittsburgh, Penn., was just coming to a close when she received a visit from Concord police Friday.
The leader of Temple Beth Jacob had planned a special service to mark the end of shloshim, a 30-day mourning period in the Jewish faith. While the shooting that claimed the lives of 11 people had happened 600 miles away, it shook the Temple Beth Jacob community, she said.
Nafshi said she had been saying the names of the dead and wounded at each Friday night service since the massacre.
Now, an hour before the start of Friday’s service, police were at her temple’s door to tell her that her community had been threatened, too.
The CIA on Friday received a number of “threatening” emails targeting members of the Concord Jewish community and police officers, Concord police Lt. Sean Ford said. Ford would not elaborate on the contents of the emails, but said they insinuated that an act of violence might occur somewhere in the city Friday night.
“It was just horror – a sense of ‘Why us?’ Why target this little Jewish community in Concord, New Hampshire?” Nafshi asked.
Police have been keeping a strong presence at the temple since Friday, Ford said. They will remain there until the threat has passed, he said.
Law enforcement also attended the lighting of the 13-foot menorah in front of the State House in Concord on Sunday night, which celebrates the first night of Chanukah. The ceremony was delayed, Nafshi said, because of an investigation into a “suspicious” silver package discovered on the State House grounds that turned out to be food.
Rabbi Levi Krinsky of Chabad of New Hampshire in Manchester, who’s in charge of lighting the menorah in front of the State House, said someone noticed the package about 30 minutes before the ceremony was scheduled to start. The event was delayed an hour while state police investigated, he said.
“Ordinarily, I would have picked it up and thrown it out, but we didn’t want to take any chances,” he said.
Nafshi said she wasn’t planning to attend the lighting of the menorah, but decided to go to express her gratitude to the Concord community for its show of support for the temple following the threats. She said many interfaith leaders had mentioned the incident during their weekend services, and planned to attend the ceremony at the State House.
“If they were coming out for us, I felt it was important for me to be there,” she said.
Nafshi said she has seen a gradual escalation of anti-Semitism in the country in recent weeks and months, some personal to her: Just over two weeks ago, she said her name appeared on a white supremacists’ blog.
“It has been profoundly disheartening for our community,” she said. “It almost seems to me like every day I’m reading about another incident of anti-Semitism.”
Krinsky said it’s something the community has been forced to become accustomed to.
“The security department today gets a lot of threats and false alarms, but they can never really afford to ignore them anymore,” he said.
But he said threats won’t change the work he or any other Jewish leaders are doing in the community. If anything, the threats make their work more meaningful, he said. He said they had one of the largest crowds ever at the menorah-lighting ceremony Sunday.
“We aren’t living in fear, because that’s not a way to live,” he said.
Krinsky said the community is eager to know that the situation has been resolved and that an arrest has been made in relation to the threats.
“We want this person to be taken care of,” he said. “These people have to be held accountable.”