Local Jewish community rallies to confront antisemitism

By Nicholas Hamburger
Contributing Writer

Arnie Fielkow, the CEO of the Jewish Federation of Greater New Orleans, and Aaron Ahlquist, a regional director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), led an informal press conference at the Jewish Community Center in New Orleans last Wednesday night (January 8), discussing how their respective organizations intend to address increasingly prevalent antisemitism.

“The most relevant topics to the Jewish community today are security and antisemitism,” said Fielkow, the former New Orleans City Council president. “I couldn’t make that statement three years ago. Not that security wasn’t important, not that antisemitism wasn’t present, but the fact is that I never would have believed that we would be having these issues in our country.”

Wednesday’s event occurred in the wake of numerous antisemitic hate crimes directed at Orthodox Jews in the northeast. Last month, in addition to a series of assaults in Brooklyn, a man broke into the home of an Orthodox rabbi in Monsey, New York and stabbed five people with a machete. The victims were preparing to celebrate Hanukkah. Prior to that, two shooters attacked a kosher supermarket in Jersey City, New Jersey, which led to the deaths of six people, including the two assailants.

Ahlquist, who oversees the ADL office that comprises Louisiana, Mississippi and Arkansas, noted that recent antisemitism has shifted “from vocalized hate or biased attitude towards physical acts.” The most extreme example of this, he pointed out, was the shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue in October 2018, when a white nationalist killed 11 people in the deadliest attack on Jews in the history of the United States.

“This normalization of physical attacks against the Jewish community is being felt by everybody,” he said. “I think it precipitates and propels the conversation around security, which is a direct response to a sense of vulnerability.”

ADL, an anti-hate organization whose mission is “to stop the defamation of the Jewish people, and to secure justice and fair treatment to all,” recorded 12 antisemitic incidents in Louisiana in 2018 – a small number compared to states with larger Jewish populations, but four times as many as the amount documented in Louisiana two years prior. Ahlquist worries that the ADL’s Annual Audit of Anti-Semitic Incidents for 2019, which is released between late February and early March, will reveal that acts of antisemitism continue to occur more frequently both in Louisiana and the United States.

Moreover, the widespread underreporting of antisemitic incidents across the country means that the actual numbers are likely even higher.

“Last year, we had over 90 cities of 100,000 people or more report zero hate crimes,” Ahlquist explained. “Baton Rouge acknowledged that it hasn’t been committing its data since 2015, even though they’ve had crimes. One of the big challenges we face is getting an accurate portrayal of what’s actually happening out there.”

Meanwhile, according to Fielkow, the Jewish Federation has entered into talks with state legislators as it tries to raise money to fund heightened security at Jewish and non-Jewish religious institutions. The organization, which describes itself as Zionist, is the central coordinating body for the Jewish community of New Orleans, though its financial support serves a substantial non-Jewish population as well.

Hours before Fielkow spoke on Wednesday evening, the Jewish Federation announced the creation of two new programs: the Sherry and Alan Leventhal Family Foundation Center for Interfaith Families and the Goldring Family Foundation Center for Jewish/Multi-Cultural Affairs. The latter center, Fielkow said, will “allow us to put all our external programming under one umbrella, focusing on four areas: Jewish-African-American relationship building; Jewish-Hispanic relationship building; our LGBTQ community; and multi-faith. We will have programs in all those areas.”

This article originally published in the January 13, 2019 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.