While we were all busy celebrating Hallowe’en this weekend, I somehow managed to hear about this:
One of the mail bombs sent by terrorists in Yemen was addressed to a small, gay-friendly synagogue in Chicago.
Or Chadash leases spaces in Emmanuel Congregation’s lakefront synagogue on the North Side.
“We have a highly visible lesbian, gay, transgender and bisexual community and at first we thought that might have attracted attention,” Lilli Kornblum, the Co-President of Or Chadash told FOX Chicago News. “But as we learned that more packages were sent, we now don’t take it personally, Well, we are taking it personally as human beings and as Jews but it seems we were randomly selected from any number of Jewish organizations in Chicago.”
Scary. But we’re not wingnuts, so I assume we’ll all continue checking the mail every day, right? Good.
Very odd. I mean, it’s no surprise to find Fundamentalist Muslims targeting Jews, and I can even buy the idea that American Jews are, shall we say, more in their radar just by virtue of being American. But why Chicago in particular?
This sort of hatred has always been somewhat beyond me, but I am not naive. I think it would be instructive to know why these people focused their attack on Chicago.
Because there is a very large and visible Jewish community in Chicago and in the northern lakefront suburbs.