Rabbi recalls coming face-to-face with shooter at California synagogue

By Bridget Clerkin

 

A candlelight vigil is held at Rancho Bernardo Community Presbyterian Church for victims of a shooting incident at the Congregation Chabad synagogue in Poway, north of San Diego, California, U.S. April 27, 2019. REUTERS/John Gastaldo

 

POWAY, Calif. (Reuters) - A 19-year-old man who authorities said gave himself up to police shortly after carrying out a deadly shooting in a Southern California synagogue filled with Sabbath worshippers is also under investigation for a mosque arson.

 

The gunman walked into the suburban San Diego synagogue late Saturday morning, the last day of the week-long Jewish holiday of Passover, and opened fire with an assault-style rifle, killing one woman inside and wounding three others, including the rabbi, authorities said.

 

In an interview on Sunday with NBC's "Today" program, Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein described the attack.

 

"I was face-to-face with this murderer, terrorist, who was holding a rifle and looking straight at me," Goldstein said. "As soon as he saw me, he started to shoot toward me. My fingers got blown away."

 

Goldstein said the woman killed was Lori Kaye, a founding member of the three-decade-old congregation.

 

"Just a kind soul," said Goldstein, who underwent surgery at the hospital. "Everyone in the community knew her."

 

A woman who said she was a friend of Kaye, Audrey Jacobs, wrote on Facebook that Kaye left behind a husband and a 22-year-old daughter.

 

"Lori would have wanted all of us to stand up to hate," Jacobs wrote. "She was a warrior of love and she will be missed."

 

The other two wounded were an 8-year-old Israeli girl and her uncle. Their family had moved to the United States in search of a safer life after their home in Sderot on the Gaza border was hit several times by Palestinian rocket attacks.

 

The sheriff said they were struck by shrapnel but were "doing well" at a local hospital.

 

After the shooting, the suspect fled in a car, escaping an off-duty U.S. Border Patrol agent who shot at the getaway vehicle but missed the suspect. The suspect pulled over and surrendered to police officers a short time later.

 

The suspect was identified as John Earnest, 19, of San Diego, the apparent author of a "manifesto" who claimed to have set a nearby mosque on fire last month and professed drawing inspiration from the gunman who killed nearly 50 people at two mosques in New Zealand.

 

San Diego County Sheriff Bill Gore said police and FBI were investigating Earnest's possible involvement in the March 24 pre-dawn arson fire at the Islamic Center of Escondido, a town about 15 miles (24 km) north of Poway. No one was hurt at the mosque fire.

 

Gore said Earnest has no prior criminal record.

 

Saturday's gun violence at the Congregation Chabad temple in the town of Poway, California, about 23 miles (37 km) north of downtown San Diego, unfolded six months to the day after 11 worshippers were killed and six others wounded by a gunman who stormed the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh yelling, "All Jews must die."

 

The assailant in that massacre, said to be the deadliest attack ever against Jews on U.S. soil, was also arrested.

 

The Passover violence came amid an upsurge in reports of anti-Semitism nationwide and abroad and followed a recent spate of deadly attacks on places of worship around the world.

 

Suicide bombings during Easter Sunday services at several churches in Sri Lanka killed more than 250 people. A gunman who opened fire at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, on March 15 left 49 people dead and more than 40 wounded, some as they knelt in prayer.

 

Gore told reporters authorities were investigating the attack as a potential hate crime.

 

A rambling, violently anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim screed written by an individual calling himself John Earnest was found posted to the online text-storage site Pastebin.com and the file-storage site Mediafire.com. Links to the content on both sources were posted on the far-right internet message board 8chan.

 

In that letter, the author also claimed credit for the Escondido mosque arson, which was put out by congregants who were sleeping inside and woke up to the smell of smoke. Local media at the time reported that a message scrawled on the driveway of the mosque mentioned the New Zealand massacre.

 

Earnest was enrolled at California State University in San Marcos. In a statement, the university's president said the school was "dismayed and disheartened" to learn Earnest was a student and was working with the sheriff's department.

 

He attended Mt. Carmel High School in San Diego, where his father taught physics before retiring in 2016, according to the San Diego Union-Tribune newspaper.

 

The synagogue on Saturday was hosting a holiday celebration that had been due to culminate in a final Passover meal that evening. Authorities said about 100 people were inside the temple, where Saturday services marking the Jewish Sabbath would have been under way or have just concluded.

 

(Reporting by Bridget Clerkin in Poway, California; Additional reporting by Barbara Goldberg in New York and Joseph Ax in Princeton, New Jersey; Writing and additional reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Daniel Wallis and Lisa Shumaker)

 

-- © Copyright Reuters 2019-04-29

This kind of (insert your own definition) is so wrong we were lucky the criminals gun jammed or it could have been much much worse hope the nutjob likes pelican bay cause that’s were he will end up

It is the year 2019 and adults, albeit young adults, shot people of all ages he did not know simply because of their ethnic and/or religious background.  So, we haven't gotten passed that yet with some people?  Many years from now, assuming our species doesn't self-destruct, people will read about these events and wonder about what barbarous times they were.  

 

I was never a K-12 educator, so let me throw this out for what it is worth.  I clearly recall one of my elementary school teachers gently lecturing us about prejudice and bigotry.  I should also note that the Civil Rights Act of 1964, "a landmark civil rights and labor law in the United States that outlaws discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin" [underscored comes with the quote and the link is below], had just been passed and there were a significant minority of African-American kids in our class.  They were bused in from another neighborhood.   

 

Interestingly, as best as I can recall it, the teacher did not focus on the morality involved but more on how ignorant and silly it was to judge another simply due to their skin color or their ethnic background.  We discussed it very calmly, and I recall all of the kids were paying close attention.  I cannot speak for the other kids, of course, but that day had always stuck with me.  I have always reacted to prejudicial remarks and bigotry as something coming from someone who is, at best, just ignorant as if they had said the sun revolves around the earth.

 

I must also admit that my parents helped in this regard as well.  Yes, people are influenced by their respective cultures, but we seem to focus too much on our differences rather than the same shared human experiences of life.  

 

Anyway, after that rather long anecdote (sorry!), I wonder how much schools and other authority figures influencing kids should help in this regard,  My uncle, who was a sports coach at a mainly African-American school, once introduced me to a black kid who was my age.  We had a long friendly talk, like young guys do, and I discovered that we had so much in common despite our different skin color.  As my uncle said, "He's a really nice kid."  It just reinforced my belief that prejudice is a dumb thing. 

 

I am sure that some schools have undertaken such a task...I hope.  I confess to not knowing the stats on this.  Yet, I wonder if we just need to tweak this up some more as what had happened to me.  Maybe, just maybe, some day such events will be considered as an unthinkable occurrence. 

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964

1 hour ago, helpisgood said:

I wonder how much schools and other authority figures influencing kids should help in this regard, 

Yes, America no longer sees color. That's why was elected the orange dotard. Meanwhile...

 

https://daily.jstor.org/the-destruction-of-a-civil-rights-center/

"The Destruction of a Civil Rights Center

The Highlander Research and Education Center was “the most notable American experiment in adult education for social change.” It recently burned down...

 

There was a fire at the Highlander Research and Education Center in New Market, Tennessee, on March 29th, 2019. Arson is suspected. White supremacist symbols were found in the aftermath of the blaze, which destroyed the administrative building and decades of archives within it."

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2018/04/12/two-thirds-of-millennials-dont-know-what-auschwitz-is-according-to-study-of-fading-holocaust-knowledge/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.995b877491d3

"Two-thirds of American millennials surveyed in a recent poll cannot identify what Auschwitz is...

 

Twenty-two percent of millennials in the poll said they haven’t heard of the Holocaust or are not sure whether they’ve heard of it — twice the percentage of U.S. adults as a whole who said the same....

 

Asked to identify what Auschwitz is, 41 percent of respondents and 66 percent of millennials could not come up with a correct response identifying it as a concentration camp or extermination camp...."
 

https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/05/half-of-people-surveyed-by-the-adl-dont-know-what-the-holocaust-is/370801/

"...Only 54 percent of the people surveyed by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in a massive, global poll have ever heard of the Holocaust. Even more disturbing, 32 percent of these believe the event to have been greatly exaggerated or a myth..."

 

https://wtop.com/world/2019/01/ignorance-about-the-holocaust-is-growing/

"Ignorance about the Holocaust is growing...

 

...about a third of the 7,000 European respondents across seven countries knew “just a little or nothing at all” about the Holocaust. In France, nearly 20% of young adults between the ages of 18 and 34 said they had never heard of the Holocaust..."

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/28/education/28civil.html

"Students’ Knowledge of Civil Rights History Has Deteriorated, Study Finds...

 

"No student had heard of George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama, he said. One student guessed that Mr. Wallace might have been a CBS newsman."

 

“...Across the country, state educational standards virtually ignore our civil rights history..."

 

https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/4/19/18507873/arizona-school-segregation-lesson-slavery-civil-rights-history

"Schools keep teaching slavery and civil rights history in ways that traumatize black students

A teacher at an Arizona charter school had third graders yell at a black student during a lesson on school segregation. It’s part of a larger problem."

 

https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/171716

"In “What the Hell Do You Have to Lose?” Mr. Williams deftly weaves the remarkable story of the struggle for civil rights into his account of how the Trump Administration has been bent on turning back the clock and undoing or threatening advances in voting rights, school integration, equal employment, and fair housing, and other areas. He describes the unprecedented threat to civil rights under Trump..."

 

To the op's article directly: this sort of bothers me...

 

"...claimed to have set a nearby mosque on fire last month and professed drawing inspiration from the gunman who killed nearly 50 people at two mosques in New Zealand..."

 

...because that's not what I think of when I think about inspiration. Arson might be activating, murder apparently can be triggering, but neither is, to my mind, inspiring.

 

I just don't view this killer as an inspired guy. Perhaps there's a better way to describe him.

"Two-thirds of American millennials surveyed in a recent poll cannot identify what Auschwitz is"

 

Probably true but two-thirds of Americans can't find Canada on a map and 90% can't find Isreal. This is merely an indictment on the education system. Nutters, whether harmless flat earthers, birthers, to more harmful anti vaxers and right up to extremist fringe Nazi or ISIS groups will be found in every country.