This Week’s Guest: Mitch Silber

Last week, a British jihadist entered a synagogue in Colleyville, Texas and held four of its members hostage. In mid-October of last year, a woman emptied a container of gasoline and set it on fire in front of the Yeshiva of Flatbush in Brooklyn while shouting anti-Semitic obscenities. That followed an attack on Shlomo Noginsky, a rabbi in Boston who this past July was stabbed eight times outside of a Jewish day school. Roughly five weeks before that, someone emptied a bag of feces in front of the Chabad of South Broward in Florida while shouting “Jews should die.” Whether individuals or institutions are being targeted, whether they’re in New York or Texas, anti-Semitism is on the rise in America, and Jews are called to be more vigilant than in years past.

This week’s podcast guest knows a thing or two about vigilance. Mitch Silber is the former director of intelligence analysis at the New York Police Department, where he oversaw research, collection, and analysis for the department’s Intelligence Division. Now, he’s the executive director of the Community Security Initiative, a small team dedicated to securing the Jewish institutions of New York from anti-Semitic violence. In conversation with Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver, he explains why this initiative came about and what it takes to protect Jews, in New York and around the country, from the anti-Semitic threats that have become all too common in America. 

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.

Excerpt (18:25-20:09):

At a basic level our responsibility is to understand what is the level of security at every Jewish institution in the New York area. We’ve got a whole range, some are at a 90 out of 100 [in security], some are at a 10 out of 100, and for each and everyone one of them, whether it’s a synagogue, a school, a JCC, a camp, a museum, you name it, we want to improve their security so that we’ve reached a higher level. There are a variety of different modalities to do that. One of them is going there and visiting and taking a walkthrough and having a conversation with leadership. We also help them apply and win security grants from the federal government and from New York state that can provide up to $150,000 in order to improve physical security and even pay for security guards. 

We make sure that they are connected with law enforcement; that’s another really important responsibility of ours, to make sure that every one of our synagogues and schools is connected to their local precinct, their local police department. As we saw in Colleyville not long ago, Rabbi Cytron-Walker called the chief of police, whose number he had on the phone, whose officers had been to the synagogue. We want to make sure that every local precinct and police and law enforcement agency has a relationship with the Jewish institutions in their geography. We’ve also set up an emergency communications network so that on the Saturday of the Colleyville event, we were able to send out an intelligence bulletin saying here’s what we know, here’s what’s going on, here’s what we think you should do based on that.