Dealing with Hate: Heading Off Bias Crimes Before They Occur

by Jessica Steinberg

From The United Synagogue Review, Fall 1995

It was a frigid Shabbat morning last February when Rabbi Kenneth Cohen approached his synagogue -- Ohev Shalom in York, Pennsylvania -- and found a pig's head hanging on the front door. It was, says the rabbi, "abominable." But the congregation's immediate reaction that Shabbat morning was to continue with business as usual, going forward with Shabbat services and not allowing the incident to intimidate the 130 families of the synagogue. They allowed the local police to dust for fingerprints and remove the pig's head and, when Shabbat ended, they went public with the news.

Surprising? Not really, considering the number of anti-Semitic actions committed each year. According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), 2,066 anti-Semitic incidents were reported to them in 1994; 186 were vandalism acts committed against synagogues and Jewish institutions. And yet, the number of arrests made in connection with the anti-Semitic crimes in 1994 is more than double those made in 1993.

Rebecca Kaufman, an ADL research analyst who compiled their annual "Audit of Anti-Semitic Incidents" for 1994, comments that the rise of arrests may be attributed to several factors, including the growing impact of state and federal hate crime legislation, improved hate crime training programs for law enforcement officers and more focused law enforcement attention to hate crimes in local communities.

In York, it was a combination of the three that led to the quick arrest and prosecution of the young man and woman who had committed the crime. A mass media feeding frenzy soon began and Rabbi Cohen was bombarded with letters and phone calls. It became clear to him that the outrage being expressed by both the Jewish and non-Jewish community of York needed to be channeled. The congregation invited the entire community to a weekday Maariv service, adding some additional English prayers and involving several speakers from both local and state organizations. The place was packed," says Cohen. "There were about 600 people, standing room only. We actually ran out of folding chairs on this lousy rainy night in February."

What was remarkable about the gathering, comments Cohen, was the sense of solidarity. "Just being there was the message," he says. "The people in York regarded this behavior as abhorrent and wanted to stand together as a unified group."

Stephen Bush, director of the York County Human Relations Commission, a local citizens group working to defuse racial tensions, agrees with Rabbi Cohen. "A community can't be isolated," explains Bush. "We're a mix of different communities that co-exist. I shared in Ohev Shalom's grief and in all the symbolism associated with a pig's head being stuck on a synagogue."

Working with Bush, the local churches and police force, Ohev Shalom had turned the potentially intimidating act into a unifying factor for the greater community. "I couldn't tell the Jewish community what the appropriate response was in this situation," says Bush. "But I did advise them on their options: one, to control the media by standing up loudly and saying that the real message here was one of unity and [of] promoting non-violence; and two, to have an event that people could share with them to reclaim their community."

Rabbi Cohen is quick to commend the local police for their effective and efficient support, and has subsequently become involved in local anti-hate crime programming, working with Bush's coalition, Victims Services and the York D.A.'s office to combat the proliferation of bias crimes in the county. "As abominable as it was, [the incident] helped bring the greater community together and woke people up to the fact that this can happen in our town," states Cohen.

Unfortunately, most communities don't consider being proactive until they've actually experienced a hate crime. When Rabbi David Nesenoff of Oyster Bay Jewish Center in Long Island, New York, started an anti-bias educational program for the Nassau County court system, it was in response to the KKK posters stapled on telephone poles and Holocaust revisionist literature tossed on driveways of Jewish homes in his neighborhood. The goal of the program -- TRY, Tolerance Rehabilitation for Youth -- is to re-educate bias offenders so that they will understand the consequences of their actions, instead of tossing them in jail.

"The reason a kid spray paints a swastika has nothing to do with the historical perspective of the Holocaust," according to Nesenoff. "And having him watch 'Schindler's List' isn't going to reform him either. We might feel good about it, but we need them to understand why they commit this act." Instead, Nesenoff teaches leadership skills to the youths, emphasizing self-esteem and self-value in his courtroom class, surroundings which remind the students of the seriousness of their crime. "They're stepping on others in order to prop themselves up," explains the rabbi.

Rabbi Nesenoff is astonished at how relatively easy it was to create the program, which was originally funded by a state grant but now requires each participant to pay tuition. His congregation has also been extremely supportive, assisting him with phone drives and letting him know that they're proud of his work. "People aren't running to set up these programs," says Nesenoff with a note of astonishment. "You know, if you set up a bad lemonade stand when there isn't another one around for miles, you'll still get all the business."

As the organization at the forefront of efforts to deter and counter hate crimes, the ADL urges communities to take a proactive stance whenever possible. "We don't advocate media attention because it allows room for copycat acts and it plays up the concept of Jews as helpless victims," explains Roni Blau, director of ADL in San Fernando Valley, California. "We need to be proactive, not reactive -- practicing tolerance before there's intolerance."

To that end, ADL has created the A World of Difference and Combat Anti-Semitism programs, sending trained facilitators into schools to teach students about racial hatred and intolerance. ADL staffers have gone into every one of the 900 schools in the Los Angeles school district for a World of Difference, and they've also been involved in training the local law enforcement about hate crimes.

In Chicago, the Combat program has been extremely successful, says Jamie Pearlman, assistant director for the Greater Chicago/Wisconsin regional office. Pearlman trains facilitators and implements this Jewish day school and synagogue program, which educates parents and children and discusses what they've experienced in terms of bigotry and anti-Semitism. "Part of the educational process is learning how to overcome our own prejudices," says Pearlman. "The students learn that everyone has prejudices...you just can't act on them."

Rabbi Nesenoff echoes a similar sentiment when discussing his student offenders. "The bottom line is you can hate someone, but not act on it...and that doesn't mean you're an evil person," he adds. "Unfortunately, there's been an upswing of aggression... people can't handle their problems so they hit below the belt with bias... and then the crimes aren't reported because they're only measured by how much actual damage was done."

But the tide is changing with regard to prosecuting hate crimes. Thirty-five states have adopted hate crime statutes in the past few years,and the crime bill adopted by Congress in September 1994 now allows federal courts to impose stiffer penalties for hate crimes. What's the real difference? According to Matthew Campbell, a Maryland prosecutor who co-chairs the American Bar Association's committee on race and bias, bias acts were considered general intent crimes before the advent of the new statutes. If a synagogue was desecrated, the crime was treated as malicious destruction of property. Now a similar desecration would be prosecuted under sections of the hate crime statutes.

"Since we've had sentencing of youthful offenders under hate crime laws, the message has gotten through to young kids, 'Don't hit houses of worship,'" says Louise Shure, an ADL staffer in West Palm Beach, Florida. "If you commit a bias crime, you will pay double and triple -- and, hopefully, the memory won't fade."

Shure has worked with several synagogues in Florida which have been hit by vandalism and acts of desecration. And as in criminal courts from Montana to Maryland, she has seen Florida's court system employing alternative sentencing when prosecuting bias crimes. In Boca Raton, a 14-year-old boy who pled guilty to desecrating a synagogue was required to write letters of apology and, working with the rabbi, wrote essays both on why he hated Jews and blacks as well as on their accomplishments. When a teenager vandalized a synagogue in Wellington, Shure worked with the congregational attorney and the rabbi, guiding them through the local hate crime laws. The offender, pleading guilty to criminal mischief, was sentenced with community service, Holocaust education and paying restitution to the synagogue, all protocols designed by the rabbi to turn young offenders around and change racist attitudes.

While hate crimes are nothing new, our awareness of them as a society is a recent development. Behind each spray-painted swastika, Holocaust revisionist flyer or racist epithet lies a community demoralized by such hostility and outraged by the desecration to its neighborhood. Out of this outrage has grown a community-wide effort to prevent similar occurrences.

One of the more renowned hate crimes recently committed was the throwing of a cinder block through the Chanukah-decorated window of Brian and Tammie Schnitzer in Billings, Montana. The residents of Billings were enraged, and in a gesture of unity, six thousand homes displayed menorahs in their windows, leading to nationwide coverage of their city.

"The menorahs didn't happen in a vacuum... the community wanted to face this issue head-on," explains Margie MacDonald, executive director of the Montana Association of Churches, who originally conceived the menorah plan. "Everyone felt that this type of hatred transcended politics...it was talked about in pulpits, study groups and supermarkets...the soul searching went on all over town."

None of the communities involved in hate crimes and acts of bias are surprised by the support they've received. "It made me take a look at our town, and I realized that since everyone came in and supported me in the reactive sense, I wanted to take a proactive stance," explains Rabbi Cohen. "What it taught me was to look over the fence and see what's happening on the other side."