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August 20, 1999/8 Elul 5759, Vol. 51, No.46
Violence strikes close to home
ROB ESHMAN
Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles
Whether you live in Colorado, Alabama or California, one thing is certain about life in America today: The violence that seems to be forever happening somewhere else will eventually strike home. You might have thought the shootings and bombings and beatings were always, thankfully, taking place elsewhere. But what they have really been doing is circling closer.
The scenes on television of the shooting at the North Valley Jewish Community Center in suburban Los Angeles are so familiar by now they unspool like summer reruns: the helicopters circling overhead, victims fleeing the scene, SWAT teams, ambulances, the tidbit-by-tidbit babble of the news anchors. It is familiar, but it is always worse with children. Always.
The rest of the world should understand the setting of this latest attack. A Jewish community center in the summer is alive with noisy kids, enthusiastic young counselors and hovering older staff. It smells of sunscreen and pizza. Parents and staff come and go, waving as they tug their over-excited children through the ruckus. I know this, because at the time of the shooting at the North Valley, my boy, age 6, was at his day camp across town at the Westside JCC. We parents find thousands of things to worry about in any given day. It never occurred to me to worry about him at the JCC. Now that joins the list. Repeat the new American mantra: No place is safe. No place is safe.
A few years ago, during the Gulf War, anti-terrorism experts from the L.A. Police Department visited area synagogues and other Jewish institutions and encouraged them to beef up security. Some places took the advice. Those that didn't will now face complex and expensive issues of how to, in Police Chief Bernard Parks words, "harden the target" against the violence out there. JCCs have long functioned as campuses for pre-schools and camps, but have likely neglected the security responsibility that comes with being a school in today's world. But will any security measures they now take make us worry less? No, not anymore. The damage has been done, the circle has drawn tight.
An hour after the Aug. 10 shooting, local investigators were already investigating the attack as a hate crime. Experts from the Wiesenthal Center to the Anti-Defamation League have long warned that the step from a swastika to a gun is not as great as we'd like to believe.
But hate isn't the end of the story. At a press conference shortly after the shooting, Jeffrey L. Rouss, executive vice president of the Jewish Community Centers of Greater Los Angeles, departed from his written comments to add a plea for gun control. So did Rabbi Marvin Hier and the ADL's David Lehrer.
These men risked politicizing the moment, but it was a noble risk. Evidently, it can't be said often enough or loud enough by enough sane people for our representatives to understand: Hate and psychosis are not unique to our country, but easy access to firearms is. Perhaps it is time for Jews from across the religious and political spectrum to join in lobbying for saner gun laws.
The Jewish community is stunned, outraged, anxious and grieving. We feel for the injured and their parents even more because we have walked those same halls with our own children. "I'm in shock," one of our reporters on the scene of the story told me by cell phone. "My kid's Jewish day school is 10 minutes away. It's all so arbitrary."
She's right to be in shock. But she's wrong that these sorts of attacks, in America, in 1999, are all so arbitrary. On the contrary, they are beginning to feel inevitable.
Rob Eshman is managing editor of The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles.
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