Statistically, the threat of an active shooter attack is rare, and yet hate crimes and religiously motivated incidents of violence have increased in recent years. 27, 2018, a raging anti-Semite burst into Shabbat morning services and murdered 11 congregants. Kayyem’s husband and children are members of the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, where on Oct. Their access is “both a vulnerability and essential to the institution,” former Homeland Security assistant secretary Juliette Kayyem wrote on The Atlantic website this week. They are open, as well, to those who suffer, who are needy in all manner of ways. They are sanctuaries in the literal sense of the word, places of safety designed to welcome and shelter people who gather to share their spiritual beliefs in peace and harmony. Concerned about nurturing what they called a “culture of fear,” they quickly discovered that finding the right balance between the ideal and the real is difficult.Ĭhildress and Cytron-Walker would doubtless agree that houses of worship are not meant to be fortresses. Armed security guards in the vestibule or the sanctuary made church members uneasy the threat of violence, however unlikely, made them even more uneasy. Kyle Childress, a Baptist minister in Nacogdoches told the editorial board in response to reports of Congregation Beth Israel’s preparedness.Ĭhildress’ congregation, like faith communities around the world, has spent long hours in discussion and debate in recent years about the proper balance between safety and openness. “The choice is not between naïveté and reality,” the Rev.
In Colleyville, police shot and killed him shortly after Cytron-Walker and his fellow hostages fled through a side door.
Widely known as “Lady al-Qaida,” Siddiqui is serving an 86-year term.Īkram had a history of mental illness and at some point had been under law enforcement scrutiny in England. His intention, he said, was to force the release of Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani woman held in a federal prison in Fort Worth for trying to kill American soldiers. Armed with a gun and perhaps an explosive device, he held the rabbi and his congregants hostage for 11 hours, growing more agitated as the day wore on. The stranger at the door turned out to be Malik Faisal Akram, a 44-year-old British national of Pakistani descent who had made his way to the Dallas-Fort Worth area after flying into New York two weeks earlier. A passage from the 19th chapter of Leviticus is no doubt second nature to the man who goes about preparing a cup of hot tea for the visitor he has invited in: “The stranger who sojourns with you shall be a native from among you, and you shall love him as yourself for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker welcomes him into the warmth of the building. The deeply disturbing hostage incident at the Congregation Beth Israel synagogue in the Fort Worth suburb of Colleyville Saturday illustrated in agonizing real time the dilemma that most houses of worship face these days.Ī stranger knocks at the synagogue door on an unusually cold Saturday morning. (Elias Valverde/The Dallas Morning News via AP) Elias Valverde, MBR / Associated Press Police said the man was not hurt and would be reunited with his family. Shortly after 5 p.m., local time, authorities escort a hostage out of the Congregation Beth Israel synagogue in Colleyville, Texas, Saturday, Jan.
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