Synagogues have too often served as targets of hate. That animosity originally stemmed from the competition Christianity saw itself involved in with Judaism. Two passages in the New Testament’s Book of Revelations refer to a “synagogue of Satan” where Christian adherents were opposed. In 1555, Pope Paul IV’s Cum nimis absurdum (“since it is completely senseless”) bull limited Jews to but one synagogue per city.
Christian architectural iconography adopted a theme of Jewish inferiority in the Ecclesia et Synagoga (“church and synagogue”) imagery.
And then there was the 1938 Nazi Kristallnacht torching and damaging of over 1,400 synagogues
In the framework of Arab terror, again, synagogues were locations where Jews suffered in British Mandate Palestine, beginning in the 1920s.
After statehood, in 1956, there was an attack at a synagogue in Kfar Chabad. Five children and a youth worker were murdered.
In November 2014, a synagogue in Har Nof was invaded, and the Arab terrorists, employing axes, knives, and a gun, killed four worshipers.
Abroad, synagogues in dozens of places were objects of terror attacks, including Paris (1980), Vienna (1981), Rome (1982), Sacramento (1999), Caracas (2009), Pittsburgh (2019), and the recent 2025 Manchester synagogue attack, among others, where Jews were shot, killed, and wounded.
Demonstrations outside synagogues
During the past two years, pro-Hamas demonstrators have gone after Jewish events connected with Israel held at synagogues. They have rallied outside, preventing Jews from entering, and harassing, taunting, and jostling.
On Wednesday evening, November 19, in Manhattan, yet another synagogue targeting occurred.
The Park East Synagogue had been booked for an event of the pro-aliyah Nefesh B’Nefesh organization. PalAwada had advertised under the slogan, “All Out To Demand No Settlers on Stolen Land!” and “Protest the Nefesh B’Nefesh Settler Recruiting Fair!” and managed to gather 200 protestors with a significant contingent of Neturei Karta members. Their chants were incendiary and threatening.
Transitioning mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s press secretary, Dora Pekec, released a statement. It read, in part, that “every New Yorker should be free to enter a house of worship without intimidation, and that these sacred spaces should not be used to promote activities in violation of international law.”
After decades of something posing as “international law” being weaponized to deny Jews the right of settlement in their historical home (as fixed by an internationally recognized League of Nations legal decision) to term its administration of Judea and Samaria as “illegal occupation” and to define Israel’s most moral defense actions as “genocide” and “starvation,” is near-total corruption.
Shouting out “Zionism is a death cult” and “Death to the IDF” as a masked protester urges the crowd to intimidate those entering the building, repeatedly insisting that it is their duty to “make them scared,” is far from being legal, and Mamdani is aware of that. Indeed, he is part of the subversion of law as he is less a politician than an ideologue.
Similar incidents
As we know, pro-Palestine forces have chosen synagogues previously. In one instance, demonstrators who had been outside a New Jersey synagogue are being sued by the US Justice Department as they became violent. There have been additional events where rowdy pro-Palestine crowds became threatening.
Last year, in July in Kew Garden Hills, Queens, NY; at Livingston, NJ; and during the street violence in June 2024 in Los Angeles, synagogues were besieged and Jews were pushed and punched.
PalAwada used the inverted triangle emblem and demanded “a complete end to the settler-colonial project of Israel.” That is not lawful. Alarmingly, synagogues seem to possess a special allure for the pro-Palestine people.
And Mamdani, as a Free Press editorial phrased it, “is siding with an anti-Israel mob.”
The Reform movement was alarmed at “this dangerous escalation” and viewed “the weak response from the office of mayor-elect Mamdani” as insufficient, especially due to the use of the slogan “Globalize the Intifada.” Those words had been used by Mamdani himself and it took forever to for him to recant – sort of.
In a historical-theological oddity, as recorded in the New Testament’s Book of Luke, 44:4, we learn that Jesus was preaching in the synagogues of… Judea. If Judea was good enough for Jesus, there should be no opposition today for Jews to use synagogues to promote a return to Judea in Zion.
Mamdani’s usage of “international law,” when that law is not only unclear at the least and wrong at best, is simply an ideological subversion that serves the purposes of the pro-Palestine camp.
There is now a petition demanding the creation of a federal minimum buffer zone around houses of worship of 100 feet, with enforcement mechanisms to ensure that entrances remain unobstructed at all times. It needs to be supported.
It can be assumed that rallies outside mosques would be termed Islamophobic and banned.
Synagogues are the bastions of Judaism. Jews learn Jewish ritual and history in synagogues, the Hebrew language is taught there, prayers are recited, and the Torah and its commentaries are learned in those buildings. There is an awareness of the purchasing of land in Eretz Yisrael, the donation of funds for its agricultural development, and the cultivation of Torah institutions therein, which are all, inescapably, linked to the Bible, the Talmud, and 2,000 years of rabbinic literature.
Calling upon Jews to move to Israel, to buy property there, or to support people already living there is a religious duty. Protests opposing those actions should be considered religious discrimination, despite what marginal Jews may outlandishly publish.
It was the non-Jewish Persian Cyrus who, recognizing the Jewish right and duty to remigrate to the Land of Israel, to reside there and to build up that territory, declared, as recorded in the very last chapter of Chronicles II, “Whosoever there is among you of all His people… let him go up.”
Jews have a sacred obligation and responsibility as regards their homeland. Neither international law nor a New York mayor should obstruct them. Jews should not be scared to fulfill them, and their religious beliefs should be defended.
The writer is a researcher, analyst, and commentator on political, cultural, and media issues.