Synagogue Under Fire For ‘Adopt-A-Terrorist’ Program

Woodmere, NY, October 1 – The Jewish communities of Long Island’s Five Towns area are in an uproar over a local synagogue’s initiative to link individual member families with specific inmates in Israel’s prison system incarcerated for engaging in terrorist activities, an initiative under which the families would send gift packages and letters to the convicted terrorists.

The Young Israel of Woodmere announced the launch of its new program this past weekend over Rosh Hashanah, with attendance at capacity for maximum impact. The initiative, called the Quest for Understanding in Israel and the Levant via Initiatives for Niceness and Giving (QUISLING), allows each member family to randomly select a candidate from among the thousands of Palestinians currently imprisoned in Israel for politically motivated attempts to harm Israelis. But the synagogue administration did not expect the intensity of the backlash from community members and others in the Five Towns area.

The synagogue’s Facebook page and Twitter account were saturated with disbelieving or outright hostile comments Tuesday, ranging from inquiries over the veracity of reports regarding the program to direct pronouncements that the Young Israel of Woodmere had effectively removed itself from American Jewry.

“Pack up and move to Gaza,” wrote one user. “Show love for your own family first, traitors,” submitted another. Synagogue administrators were forced to disable comment submissions on Facebook to stem the tide of venom and incredulity.

“We had no idea, honestly,” said board president Harold Friedman. “American Jews pride themselves on their tolerance, so who could be against a program to promote more tolerance in the world? We’ve been shaking our heads at this since Saturday night when the first reactions came in. We thought people would jump at the chance to help get some reconciliation going, especially during the season of penitence,” he added, referring to the forty days that end with Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, this coming Saturday.

Senior Rabbi Hershel Billet conceded that some negative response should have been anticipated. “We ran a small-scale program last year to get some of our teens studying in Israel for the year to try visiting some Palestinian prisoners and strike up a conversation,” he recalled. “But the response was lukewarm at best – we got maybe two applicants, and one was probably a mistake. At the time we thought perhaps we didn’t market that effort enough, so this time around we made sure everyone knew about it by putting it front and center during Rosh Hashanah. I even devoted a few minutes to its importance during my sermon on Saturday.”

What Rabbi Billet and the administration neglected to consider, however, was the opposition from people less accepting of cultivating friendship with criminals convicted of murdering, or at least trying to murder, Jews, some of whom were close relatives of synagogue members and other area residents. On Monday a crowd of approximately 40 people demonstrated outside the Young Israel on Peninsula Boulevard to demand that the program be canceled and the people responsible for it be dismissed from their roles in the administration.

So far, eleven families have signed up. “I was kind of hoping to get the one surviving member of the group that kidnapped those three boys,” said Ilana Kaganoff, a mother of three, referring to the kidnap and murder of Eyal Yifrach, Gilad Shaer, and Naftali Fraenkel. “I have this great gluten-free, low-carb recipe that’s so much healthier than the stuff they gave out in celebration over there when the kidnapping happened.”