The FBI’s Newark workplace launched an announcement urging synagogues to “take all security precautions to protect your community and facility.”
NEWARK, N.J. — The FBI mentioned Thursday that it had obtained credible information a couple of “broad” threat to synagogues in New Jersey, a warning that prompted some municipalities to ship additional cops to guard homes of worship.
The nature of the threat was imprecise. The FBI’s Newark workplace launched an announcement urging synagogues to “take all safety precautions to defend your group and facility,” however would not say something about who made the threat or why.
The alert was posted after officers found a web based threat directed broadly at synagogues in New Jersey, a regulation enforcement official mentioned. The posting didn’t goal any particular synagogue by identify, the official mentioned. The official couldn’t talk about particulars of the investigation publicly and spoke to The Associated Press on situation of anonymity.
Messages left with the FBI’s Newark workplace weren’t returned.
Public warnings about nonspecific threats in opposition to Jewish establishments, made by a spread of teams together with Christian supremacists and Islamist extremists, aren’t uncommon in the New York City metropolitan space, and plenty of end up to be false alarms. But the world has additionally seen lethal assaults.
In Jersey City, Mayor Steven Fulop mentioned police can be posted on the metropolis’s seven synagogues and foot patrols can be added in the broader Jewish group. In 2019, two assailants motivated by anti-Jewish hate killed a police officer, then drove to a kosher market in Jersey City and killed three more people, earlier than being slain in a gun battle with police.
Police officers armed with rifles guarded a synagogue one metropolis over, in Hoboken, the place the general public security director additionally introduced elevated patrols in Jewish communities.
Five years in the past, two New Jersey males had been sentenced to 35 years in jail after being convicted for a collection of assaults in 2012 that included the firebombings of two synagogues. They additionally threw a Molotov cocktail into the house of a rabbi as he slept together with his spouse and kids.
In 2019, a person stabbed five people at a Hanukkah celebration at a rabbi’s house in an Orthodox Jewish group north of New York City, fatally wounding one particular person.
U.S. Rep. Josh Gottheimer, a New Jersey Democrat, mentioned he was “concerned and outraged” by the most recent threat in opposition to Jews.
“I’m deeply involved and outraged by at this time’s alert from the FBI,” Gottheimer said. “This is what happens after years of antisemitic comments from public figures,” he added, citing recent comments by Kanye West and a social media post shared by NBA star Kyrie Irving.
The FBI did not launch any information suggesting the threat that prompted the warning was associated to the general public debate over these feedback.
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