‘We are in a time of biblical proportions’: Survivors of past shul attacks want Central Synagogue to know

This story was originally published in the Forward. Click here to get the Forward’s free email newsletters delivered to your inbox.

When Audrey Glickman heard about the Friday night attack at Central Synagogue, a prominent congregation on Manhattan’s East Side, she had a visceral, immediate reaction.

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“My first thought with anything like this is: they’ve been invaded,” she said. “And I know how that feels.”

Glickman, 69, survived the October 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue building — the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S. history that killed 11 worshippers from three congregations. She was leading services when she heard the rat-a-tat of gunfire. She grabbed fellow congregant Joe Charny, then 88, and raced up the stairs  into a small room filled with bags of clothes to be donated to those in need. Together, huddled and scared, they hid under their prayer shawls until it was over.

In New York City this weekend, an attacker struck a congregant and a security guard, then was arrested and charged with hate crimes. Police said no one was seriously hurt.

“You never shake that feeling that somebody came into your space and invaded your safety, and you can’t undo it,” Glickman said. “My heart goes out to them.”

The suspect in New York, Larry Montes, 46, was charged with felony hate crimes and told police afterward that the attack was religiously motivated, citing hostility toward Jews and Black people. Montes, who has two prior misdemeanors, was granted bail at his Saturday night arraignment and is due back in court Thursday.

The attack landed amid a citywide surge: New NYPD data shows anti-Jewish hate crimes in New York rose 8.5% during Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s first seven months in office and made up 57% of hate crimes citywide, with July alone seeing a 53% jump from a year earlier.

Glickman said she hopes New York officials can eventually give the congregation answers. A federal jury sentenced the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter to death in August 2023.

“I hope they have the kind of investigators that we had here to figure out what went on,” she said. “When you can close up the case, it feels a lot better.”

But Glickman said every targeted congregation eventually has to answer a harder question: How do you stay open to strangers, newcomers and the unaffiliated, while keeping the people inside safe?

For that answer, she said, members of Tree of Life turned to a friend: the Rev. Eric Manning of Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, where a gunman killed nine Black worshippers during a Bible study in 2015.

Manning and then-Tree of Life’s Rabbi Jeffrey Myers leaned on each other. Myers invited Manning to speak at the funeral of Rose Mallinger, the oldest of the shooting victims, and the two clergy have stayed close in the years since. Manning’s advice to Glickman’s congregation has stayed with her: “You can’t close your doors.”

Nearly eight years later, Glickman still goes to shul most mornings, and still worships on Shabbat with Tree of Life, which continues to meet in borrowed space while its building is rebuilt.

Her message for the congregation in Manhattan: “We’re here, and we know how they feel,” Glickman said. “It’s not a good feeling, and we shouldn’t have to live with this. We are in a time of biblical proportions.”

‘The walls will never be high enough’

Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker, 50, has an unusually direct connection to Central Synagogue. In January 2022, a gunman held Cytron-Walker and three congregants hostage at Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas, after Cytron-Walker let him in from the cold and offered him tea.

The gunman, Malik Akram, had done his research, the FBI later found: He’d chosen the synagogue because it was the closest one to the federal prison holding Aafia Siddiqui, sentenced to 86 years for attempted murder and other felonies. Akram demanded her release and ordered Cytron-Walker to get America’s equivalent of a chief rabbi on the phone. He’d seen photos of Central Synagogue’s senior rabbi, Angela Buchdahl, with President Barack Obama and insisted that Cytron-Walker call her.

Cytron-Walker didn’t know her personally; he tracked down a number and left her a voicemail.

The 11-hour standoff — caught in its entirety on the synagogue’s security cameras — ended with all the hostages escaping unharmed. Authorities shot and killed Akram on the scene.

“While it was sad to hear that there was an attack at Rabbi Buchdahl’s congregation, I was very grateful to hear that the security protocols they have in place minimized any disruption,” Cytron-Walker said.

He was struck by how quickly the congregation returned to prayer. “You always have to weigh, when there’s a disruption, what the community needs in that moment,” he said. “What the community needed was not to let what turns out to be a minor incident ruin the night — to be able to celebrate Shabbat as a community despite the disruption.”

Cytron-Walker, now the spiritual leader of Temple Emanuel in Winston-Salem, North Carolina,  said Jewish congregations have to hold two values at once. “We have to live our values of loving the stranger,” he said. “Judaism has always been a part of the world, even when we try to isolate ourselves from it. The walls will never be high enough.”

At the same time, he said, “it is also a Jewish value to protect our own lives, to value our own lives. We should employ that with the rational part of our brain, not the emotional part. We shouldn’t panic, but we should be prepared.”

Just like Glickman, Cytron-Walker said he hopes Central Synagogue receives the kind of support that helped his own congregation heal.

“The Jewish people are not only receiving hate,” he said. “We’re also receiving love and support. It may not always be as much as we want, and when we do receive it, let’s offer gratitude and allow that to help with our healing.”

This story was originally published on the Forward.